This whole essay is a welcome relief from the spate of “good riddance” posts I’ve mostly seen, either with a political slant or (less caustic, these) in comics-adjacent spaces where Adams has long been sneered at because of his mediocre art.
I think an important moment for the evolution of Dilbert (or Adams) is the 2008 financial crisis. I remember reading the Dilbert book that collected the strips from that era and thinking how different in tone they were from previous collections—literally apocalyptic. “And thus ended capitalism,” the narrator/caption intones in one strip. “Maybe you should worry that the only viable livelihood of the future involves cannibalism,” the PHB boss tells Dilbert in another. I copied these quotes down, they seemed such a level-jump from the strip’s previous despairing laments about inefficiency.
Relevant to the topic of this piece, Drew Carey is a really good example of a super smart nerd who realized his limitations and played within them. His celebrity appearance on “who wants to be a millionaire” is a master class in character study. It’s in his autobiography somewhat, but also in the radio show he hosted for years, he saw what he could and couldn’t accomplish and took his money and time to just share with us the things he liked.
Drew Carey's TV sitcom was a smash its first few years so he signed a huge contract extension with (I believe) ABC, one that turned out reminiscent of Milton Berle's notorious 30 year million dollar per year contract in 1951 with NBC. Just as the public got tired of Uncle Miltie, the public got tired of Drew's show and he couldn't figure out how to boost his ratings.
To his credit, to earn his exorbitant pay Carey voluntarily took on a lot of additional work for ABC, such as emceeing its big annual meeting in which it gets affiliates to sign up again for next season by promoting upcoming programs.
That's really interesting. I respected him because he's someone who decided he wanted to be a comedian and then just worked super hard at it and made it happen. He seemed like a cool, unpretentious guy.
I think the first two were mandatory, but what filled in the third slot was a little more flexible. For whatever reason it ended up being Garfield for me (but also a South African political satire called Madam and Eve, and later Bloom County).
I'll add my name to the list of weirdly young people who were often seen reading business books that had cartoons in them.
I think his writing on Affirmations in The Dilbert Future was probably the seed he planted that later led me into the Rationality community. If Adams had been born later, he would have been a LW poster. In many ways I think he nailed down some of the core ideas around motivation and goal-setting.
Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side were both essential for me as a kid, I devoured the collections and turned to the comics page for their sake only. Interesting to me that there is such a deep love for Dilbert - at the time I viewed it as belonging to the same category as Garfield, Nancy (is that what it was called?), etc. of corny and unfunny strips that I would nevertheless grudgingly read when I had too recently read the entire Calvin and Hobbes catalogue to pick a place to start again...
C&H was fantastic, but I did like The Far Side as well. Dilbert was always a little too implicitly bitter for me.
It's a shame that Adams tried to treat with cancer with Ivermectin, but I do think his shift to the MAGA side of the political spectrum was part of a necessary cultural process.
I thought you were thinking of Cathy, but apparently there's an ongoing comic called Nancy that's been running since 1938, that I've never heard of before.
Dilbert never touched Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes for me, but I enjoyed it and always read the ones I saw. Sort of... B.C. level, I'd say. Much better than Wizard of Id, or Doonesbury. Or Cathy.
I'm pretty sure Cathy is the one I was thinking of, maybe subconsciously I was somehow aware of a comic called Nancy. Doonesbury, Wizard of Id were others in the same tier but I couldn't remember the name of either. I went through a period of obsession with Pogo, which I think is the only other strip to reach the heights of C&H for my tastes.
C&H is the GOAT - says this comics nerd. Far Side and Walt Kelly's Pogo round out the top 3. In the next tier of greatness you have Peanuts, Dilbert, Bloom County, the classic Krazy Kat, R. Crumb, maybe a few others. There is nothing comparable coming out now.
I suspect it's not a coincidence. I think his writing works well if you're interested in the subject, but not really familiar with it. I remember thinking his writing about pop physics was cool when I was a kid, but then when I later studied physics in college I realized how much that sort of pop physics gets wrong in important ways. Likewise, when I later became a software engineer, I thought that it was *sort of* like Dilbert but not really at all. Like, OK, we had cubicles and used computers, but that's about it. The engineers were well-respected, the managers were also smart (usually they were former engineers), and we didn't waste a lot of time in meetings. All the things that a nerdy 10-year-old or ex-banker-turned-cartoonist might think to look down on didn't really exist.
Count me among the folks who loved Dilbert as a child. I think part of this is that early Dilbert was less workplace focused (like with the dinosaurs) but it the strip also has a sense of humor that's goofy and pokes fun at authority, both of which are very appealing to kids.
I also remember reading his "Law of Attraction"-like content in The Dilbert Future at summer camp in the 90s and thinking he was maybe kind of nuts.
Reading this post, it almost seems like Adams may have lost his mind through normal age-related cognitive decline -- there's a definite thread of increasing paranoia. In addition to the burrito anecdote in the post, you also see it in his revisionist history of why his TV show failed, originally he said it was because the timeslot was awful, later he said it was due to anti-white racism.
The Dilbert cartoons weren’t realistic, but I did find many of them funny when I was working as a software engineer. I particularly remember Adams’ take on the Lucent logo (June 11 & 12, 1996).
Interesting. I'm not sure I'd call it great although I like the writing. Dilbert feels like a good vehicle to be reimagined as a vessel for existential despair, but I think the comic panels have an immediate tone which clashes with the apocalyptic tone that the artist was going for here. And small details like the boss holding the coffee mug and Dilbert staring at his monitor give a sense of ordinariness which really undercuts the apocalyptic writing. Maybe those details could have been reworked to lend impact instead (like... is Dilbert just staring at a blank and dusty screen?); but that's not the direction the artist took things in. Overall I think it would work more for me if I were a lot less familiar with Dilbert... I enjoyed the writing when I dissociated it from the visuals. But in that case, I guess I have to question what the benefit is of using the Dilbert strips in the piece.
I don't know if you've ever seen "Dilbert 2" and "Dilbert 3" by cboyardee (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9xfqMtkmN0 ). I think they're a more successful remixing of Dilbert? Definitely carried pretty hard by the music though.
Among the numerous intellectual gifts I have received from reading Scott Adams is that I started reading slatestarcodex on his recommendation (which then had a huge influence on me). I had known about slatestarcodex even before, but it was Adams' recommendation that gave me the energy to overcome my reading-inertia and start poring through long articles of Alexander. The recommendation was perhaps in a post about the third of the "Scott A" trifecta, Aaronson.
What do you think has changed in Trump's second term? All I've seen is him doing what he promised regarding illegal immigration. He hasn't declared martial law, suspended elections, or rounded up all non-whites or even all Hispanics to be put in camps. He's still boorish, prone to hyperbole, etc., but I think the wolf-crying is still going on.
Put it this way, which of these predictions our host made in that article have been proven FALSE in his second term?
1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]
3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 95%]
4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]
6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%]. {link to the Gallup poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx}
7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].
> What do you think has changed in Trump's second term? All I've seen is him doing what he promised regarding illegal immigration. He hasn't declared martial law, suspended elections, or rounded up all non-whites or even all Hispanics to be put in camps. He's still boorish, prone to hyperbole, etc., but I think the wolf-crying is still going on.
I think his increasing willingness to do things with executive orders and not through congress is worrying.
Trump might not technically be a tyrant yet, and in many cases you can point to other presidents of the last 26 years with actions that laid the precedence for Trump's actions (for example, Obama's Dear Colleague letter, vs. Trump's shakedown of Harvard), but I still think his second term has felt like he's doing actually drastic things like the Liberation Day tariffs because there aren't enough adults in the room to tell him no anymore. Sure, he walked that one back, showing he has at least some limits, but the fact he was willing to try it in the first place is not reassuring.
You can also point to things like Trump paying the military during the shutdown, even after the authorization for funding from Congress did not exist. While I'm willing to write that one off as a prudential move, it's kind of the whole game at that point, isn't it? If Trump is bringing back impoundment and not spending Congressionally apportioned money, and he's choosing to spend money without Congressional backing, then in some sense he has given himself room to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, regardless of any legal backing to do so.
There's also things like how he's handled Europe, particularly Greenland. Our European allies shouldn't feel the need to send token troops into Greenland to discourage Trump from potentially invading. Even if you think Trump never *really* intended to conquer Greenland, he said things during his first term and this one that didn't properly reassure our allies that he wouldn't do that, and that is a failure on his part.
I'm someone who used to roll my eyes at other people's Trump derangement syndrome. I felt like if Trump 2 was just more of Trump 1 it would be something America could bear. But I think a lot of his actions in Trump 2, like DOGE (which always had dubious legal authority), and his recent desires to end Fed independence are all evidence of bad judgement and worse instincts for what will be good for America.
Scott acknowledged that much of the original rhetoric about Trump was correct, in that very article. I mean, what part of "incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country" did you not understand? Scott's point was that basically every bad thing people had said about Donald Trump was correct...
*Except* for the thing about him being a super extreme white supremacist racist. Scott begged people to criticize Donald Trump for "literally anything else", because all the other stuff was true but the "racist" thing was just crying wolf and needlessly burning credibility.
Now we have the Trumpian ICE rounding up and deporting probably hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Including brown, black, yellow, and yes white-skinned European immigrants, all with the same lack of respect for due process. Hell, the German government had to issue a travel advisory to their citizens after some were subject to gratuitously abusive treatment before their unwarranted deportation.
That makes Trump a *nativist*, which is not the same thing as being a racist. Previous generations of American nativists have made non-native white people the focus of their venom; now that's more of a sideline but probably mostly because the demographics of the immigrant population have changed. Maybe nativism is wrong or even evil. You could make a good case for that if you wanted. But even so, it's a different evil than racism.
But too many people have had their minds killed by the belief that RACISM = EVIL = RACIST, that all racist people are evil and all evil people are racist and if someone is evil then "racist" is the word you use to tell all right-thinking people how evil they are and coordinate the hate. So here we have Donald J. Trump dialing all the *other* wrongness up to eleven, and you all are burning your credibility by saying "see, we *told* you Trump was super duper racist, are you ready to admit you were stupid for not joining the bandwagon by saying Trump is a racist too"?
Trump runs the country like an experienced manager runs software developers -- ask what his people need, and focus on getting it for them.
He built the "wall" to Border Patrol specs (they knew what sort of "great wall of china" they wanted). He's getting Greenland for the military (ditto Venezuela).
I started SSC because he recommended you as well. I wasn't an acolyte of his, but like you mentioned above I was intrigued by some of the things he said about the Trump phenomenon that rang true. (Like how he played the media by strategically exaggerating his claims.) I followed him off and on for awhile, but he started getting into woo and making ridiculous claims/predictions/sentiments until the ratio of signal to noise became too much to bear.
Just after the election in 2016, I remember he called out your post that was titled something like, "They're crying wolf", about Trump being racist. The thrust of your post was effectively, "Media are trying to smear Trump by inaccurately branding him a racist, instead of making any of the available high-minded arguments for why you should reject his politics." I remember at the time I was mildly annoyed that you waited until after the election to make your case, but found a number of other great archive posts.
While I stopped following the other Scott because his content was only occasionally good (and less so over time). I continue to read your takes because your content quality remains strong.
Yep. My story reading your blog goes like this: I heard about the NYT doxing you, felt some outrage and read some SSC articles, then moved on to other things. Then Adams recommended you and you went on my permanent I-want-to-pretend-to-take-a-break-from-work goto. The article I read that got me there was the one cited below, about not burning outracist accusations on Trump and thereby burning out credibility.
Scott Alexander uses a lot of micro humor in his writing, as does Dave Berry and Scott Adam’s (in his books). It’s a rare technique but extremely enjoyable.
They were both attacked by malicious journalists, but for some reason he seems to believe the same slander against Scott Adams, even repeating the lie that he went on a "racist rant" in this very article.
Did he not say that white people should get away from black people, or something to that effect? I think I get WHY he said it, as push-back against anti-white racism, but I still find it over the top and not helpful.
Clearly not everything, though I never denied a lot of woke agenda is pushed by privileged white people who never have to suffer the consequences of those policies.,
Hmm, if so, that really is much more of a "significant cancelation" than I thought. I was thinking about the fact that his public-facing work mostly remained similar, and that most of his revenue has long been from Substack. But as I think back, I realize that he may not have switched to Substack until after that NYTimes article ran. So I underestimated the significance of this event to his career.
But it's very hard to read the New York Times article as either an attempted or actual "cancelation" - Cade Metz was clearly irresponsible in insisting on using Scott's legal name rather than the name of his public persona (I don't think similar articles insist on referring to Lady Gaga as "Stefani Germanotta"), and the article included some (in my mind justified) negative sentiment about the number of racists and reactionaries that like to hang out in the comment threads here.
But he certainly wasn't calling for anyone to fire Scott, he didn't try to make Scott any less widely read, and he absolutely didn't succeed in making Scott any less widely read, unlike the literal cancelation of Dilbert syndication in many publications.
Lady Gaga isn't a great point of comparison; while she chooses to use a stage name her true identity is well known and she has never attempted to hide it.
> But he certainly wasn't calling for anyone to fire Scott
And Henry II never called for anyone to kill Thomas Becket either, he just wondered aloud if anyone would ever do something about his turbulent priest problem.
>But it's very hard to read the New York Times article as either an attempted or actual "cancelation"
I mean, Scott had told Metz in no uncertain terms that he'd stop blogging to keep his name from being published, and they still were unwilling to accommodate him (unlike with many other NYT-sympathetic personalities). I don't see how this could be attributed to anything other than malice/contempt.
>negative sentiment about the number of racists and reactionaries that like to hang out in the comment threads
There was also the accusation of "alignment with Charles Murray". Ironically, this too would have been a fair point, but Scott was careful enough not to have a public quote of taboo opinions, so they resorted to using a non-taboo agreement for their heavy implication.
>But he certainly wasn't calling for anyone to fire Scott, he didn't try to make Scott any less widely read
No, he was just exposing a den of heresy to the pious NYT flock. Of course, for some not-so-pious readers it had the opposite effect, but this was deemed a tolerable tradeoff.
>the article included some (in my mind justified) negative sentiment about the number of racists
I wonder what you think of Noel Ignatiev and Tema Okun, if you're familiar with either? Or what you think the NYT would comment on them?
(To be clear, my position is that both are far, *far* more vile and racist than anyone that comments here, and they were/are consistently rewarded it for it, rather than causing their hosts to be abused for simply not banning them)
>he didn't try to make Scott any less widely read
He quite specifically tried to make Scott look bad and searched around for more negative comments. That he failed should not be evidence that it wasn't part of his intent- though to be fair, no one really knows his intent.
Yes, but that was because he did not want his patients to associate him with his blog, nor did he want his readers to be able to find his psych practice.
He was doxxed, not canceled. There is a difference!
This is wrong. Everything happened before the NYT story ever came out.
Scott was told the NYT was going to do a story on him. The NYT reporter said he was going to use his real name in the story. Scott exploded the story by deleting SSC over it. In the fallout, he opted to leave his job so he wouldn't do psychotherapy anymore and so that his office wouldn't keep getting calls from people trying to get him fired. This is the quote from the blog at the time (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive)
"And I left my job. They were very nice about it, they were tentatively willing to try to make it work. But I just don't think I can do psychotherapy very well while I'm also a public figure, plus people were already calling them trying to get me fired and I didn't want to make them deal with more of that."
I mean, Scott is free to think of it however he wants, but what happened to Scott (though very bad) did not appear to me to be a "cancellation" in the classic sense. Possibly downstream of the same social instinct though.
One simple trick to avoid cancellation: quit before you could get fired! Mobs hate this.
More seriously, if you are a famous person, you should definitely diversify your income, not only because if 100% comes from your employment, you are leaving money on the table, but also because anything you sell becomes your *insurance* against cancellation -- the moment you get cancelled is also your 15 minutes of fame, many people will hate you, but some will come with the opposite attitude (they may be a minority, but still many in absolute numbers), and if you can convert this attention to sales, it may compensate for the lost income from your job. Many celebrities try to create controversy so that people start paying attention to them again; you get one controversy in your life for free!
Scott Alexander gained new subscribers, some of them paying. Jordan Peterson sold his online self-help courses. I wonder if Scott Adams also sold more of his books the moment he was cancelled.
Speaking of dopplegangers, there is a companion piece to be written comparing Adams to Bill Watterson that consists entirely of negative space surrounding the statement: "And then the cartoonist retired...."
Disagree that God's Debris is bad. However The Religion War was garbage, save for his anticipating states seeking out influencers, the ones under the radar and under the hood. Scott ended up being one such influencer, like Locke and Demosthenes in Ender's Game, except probably unwittingly state-controlled.
I think Adams' last chapter, his unshakable commitment to whatever it was he really saw as his mission, was defined by the company he kept. One post drove it home for me, when he asked, "Don't you suppose I'm in a position where I have friends/access to privileged information," paraphrased, and seeming to indicate national security concerns. In fact there is no one with true or clear information, and anyone claiming to have privileged knowledge is at best delusional.
I loved both God books, and I wasn't an edgy teenager, but in my late 20s when I read them. I was, however, in a period of fascination with the idea of a non-personal God (I also discovered Jefferson's Bible, mentioned in this article, at around the same time.)
I can't give specificities partly because it's been so long, but also because what I gleaned was sort of abstract. It helped cement my model of reality, it reflected some of my bigger thoughts which I had developed independently, and took them a bit further. Part of it was surprise that someone else had come to the same conclusions. I'm sure those ideas are old hat for philosophers and anyone who's studied them. But when you make them from your own knowledge, accruing that information is a different experience, and it's integrated into your understanding differently. For most people the idea of god is either a lie they tell themselves, or academic. I don't believe in god, but god exists, because everything is a quantum state. I think Scott was purely intuitional. These things can't wholly be explained because language is a limited technology.
You think that for a couple reasons. One is that you suppose if a new, digital analog of Operation Mockingbird were existent, you would know about it. But you wouldn't. The vast majority of similar programs are never known to the public. The other major reason you're able to remain blissfully unaware is that PM and associated programs are crooned on about and parroted almost exclusively by wingnuts, which discredits them so far that most people refuse to accept that factual history is even real, and in any event your mental filter learns to ignore hot button terms and topics even peripherally associated with the lexicon of said wingnuts.
Yes, there are literal disinformation experts in our Federal government, yes, they do disseminate disinformation. We can discuss whether or not this is appropriate behavior for any given case, but first you need to know that yes, this is happening.
One should cultivate a healthy skepticism of fact-checking websites, as well as "friends" you have never met.
I mean, when the President and Vice President both sing accolades in the wake of your death, it's not *entirely* unreasonable to suppose that Adams may have had more insight to the inner workings of this country than the average bear.
What are we talking about here? I've been hearing just about every other podcast of Adams since 2016 (and I'm another one who made it here because of Adams' reference to slatestarcodex).
1. Adams’ was operating on what he believed to be insider knowledge, 2. He was embarrassingly wrong on some conclusions he was too smart to be wrong about, and 3. His opinions appeared at odds with mainstream, however those opinions served the interests of the true power base, which is what you should really be looking at. Not what they appear to serve, not if they go against the grain, not if they make you feel good, but who they serve.
I do remember him mentioning in several podcasts that he was privy to information he couldn't share, but could hint at. I recall when I thought he was putting one of those magic hints out there, he heavily couched it in epistemology ("I don't know if this is just information being fed to me, but...")
I think overall Adams was pretty honest about what he was up to. He taught me how to see through BS very well.
Example: statements like "His opinions appeared at odds with mainstream, however those opinions served the interests of the true power base" trip exactly the wires Adams taught me to set up. A vague, unfalsifiable statement that could be said about anyone.
He was wrong about Covid, and I wasn’t. So while he had valuable things to say, he had no credibility in the end.
Since you know so much about him, I take it you are a fan? And given that I was right about the most important tyrannical push in human history while he wasn't, may I recommend that you become *my* acolyte now?
>There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget
I had a boss once who did a sting as factory CFO. He noticed productivity spikes, and realised they were during the weekend, when management was off.
There's a medical study which purports to prove that mortality drops every year during the major cardiologists' conference, when all the bigshot cardiologists are away and let the residents handle the service. I don't know how much to trust it, but it's plausible and funny.
There are reasons why this might happen that don't amount to "the bigshots are mismanaging things and it works better without them there". For instance, they might delay operations until the bigshots come back, and the operations have some chance of immediate death (while increasing average long term survival).
For the love of god please adjust your use of the word "prove." This isn't a nit pick, it's something that makes any statistician want to pull out what's left of their hair. And you do it frequently (and my hairline is not in good shape).
Provability is a property of the data set and the analysis, not of the number of studies that analyze it. You are, of course, right that it is usually the case that one study doesn't prove anything.
This is a totally different theory. Semmelweis's very famous experiment was testing his theory of hand sanitization. Everyone sanitizes their hands now, all levels of provider.
I know that I, an engineer, will occasionally clear my plate and tell everyone to piss off so I can go solve a hard problem. Much like those judges who learn to schedule their case loads so they get lunch on time. Perhaps choosing to work on a problem on the weekend is a version of this with more subtle social graces.
Two most successful projects of my software development career happened when my manager was temporarily assigned to a different project and couldn't pay attention to what I was going. In both cases (two different companies, different managers), I successfully completed the project before the manager returned, in much shorter time than was originally planned.
I also tried starting my own company, and failed horribly. The skills needed to build a project are different from the skills needed to sell it.
I've seen this happen so often it's become a baseline assumption. I tell my clients--and these are the ones I take, the ones I think have a chance--that the work/tech/skills are 5% of what's important to the potential startup/product/company.
It's actually less than 5%, but you have to give them *something*.
In my opinion, the way to sell that hard truth to our fellow engineers is to simply ask: "what is the value of the perfect answer to the wrong question?"
The answer isn't zero, but it's also clearly less than the sum of its parts. For me it was the beginning of the road to the wisdom of asking what the customer needs, rather than what you want to build.
Bingo, it's why your first employee and generally 49.9% partner is a sales guy. I never respected sales as a profession until I worked in a small service business.
It depends on what is considered as productivity. (For example for the last ~2 years I'm working on a project and we have quite a lot of data - but not good stats - about output. There are 2 kinds of tasks. Things that add incrementally to the "product" (features, fix visible bugs) and things that incrementally add to everything else (update some dependency, rework some part of the code, make the compilation/build faster, introduce some new tool that will help use write better code).
Obviously when the product people are out the output is skewed a lot more toward the latter kind, and many times that's where the spikes are/were.
(Many times the spikes are things rushed that look good initially, but then will require a lot of rework.)
How much of this is applicable to factories (and medicine) is left as an exercise to the reader.
"A Famous Man", by Machado de Assis, is a short story about a man who wrote the world's best polkas, but wanted to write requiem masses. It's worth reading an the only thing I could think of during the entire first half of the article.
Waltzes are easy. First, write a march, then delete every fourth beat.
(Now I had to go searching for "The Stars And Stripes Forever But It's A Waltz" on youtube; sadly nobody has made that but I did find Weezer's Buddy Holly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE3RmfFJmAc )
Alan Moore is perpetually annoyed that whenever he goes on tour to promote something new he wrote, people just want to ask him about the superhero comics he wrote in the Eighties.
And I'm a guy who considers himself a big Moore fan who has never been tempted to read his prose. I am among one of the many people he would instantly dislike.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was incensed that everyone praised his Sherlock Holmes stories, and it was clear to him that nobody would remember any of his other literary and historical works, which he considered far superior. ( I would give some examples. but I've forgotten them! )
Korney Chukovsky, who is one of the cornerstone writers of children's literature in Russian (think Dr. Seuss), lamented that people didn't value his works in the field of literary history.
The Wizard of Oz series is another notable example. Although nowadays, nobody even remembers that there was more than one, so Baum didn't even get the lasting success of Doyle.
I know about the 14 books written by Baum (plus there were many sequels written by other authors), and I hoped to read them one day, but they never got sufficiently high on my priority list. So I asked Claude for an opinion why only the first book is known, and from what it said, it seems that...
1) The sequels are also very good (and sold well), but not as good as the first book.
There are other places adjacent to Oz that we get to explore (the land of Ev, underground caves, islands). Some books have different protagonists (Tip, Ojo, Betsy Bobbin, Shaggy Man, Trot, Cap'n Bill, Inga, Tin Woodman, Ozma); some of them children from Earth, some of them natives of Oz. There are different unique ways to get to/from Oz. Halfway in the series, Dorothy and her family moves to Oz permanently. In other words, the story does not seem repetitive; there is both enough continuity and enough novelty.
However, the sequels do not have the same feeling of mystery, and the stakes are generally lower. Now we mostly know what the land of Oz is, and that it is possible to return from it. The villains in the sequels are generally less dangerous, the conflicts less existential.
The first book had a solid plot (Dorothy wants to get home, assembles a party, defeats an antagonist, gets home), the sequels feel more scattered, as author keeps inventing new parts of Oz that are not essential to the story, and the characters just kinda walk through them and adventures happen to them randomly. Also, the author couldn't resist bringing many popular characters from the previous books to the later books, so the party sometimes gets too crowded.
(Compared to other famous books with sequels: In Harry Potter you have one overarching story across all books. In Narnia, as new characters appear in later books, the characters from the previous books mostly disappear, so each book has a reasonable number of characters.)
2) The movie based on the first book was *super* famous. Then there was some complicated legal situation (different entities owned book rights, stage rights, film rights) which prevented making of a sequel. Most people actually know the movie, not the first book per se. Even the following movies were mostly based on the first movie, not the book.
One problem is that he invented the modern YA series about 75-80 years too early.
"Franchises" like Potter depend on a steady influx of readers and a low churn rate, which you can only really achieve with modern systems of advertising media and distribution. Timing is also critical--the largest number of tweens in American history occurred right about when the first Potter book dropped.
Baum's publication history, and the Baum franchise, are a fascinating study...in essence, he invented that marketing machine, including cross-branding and promotion (stage shows! dinnerware!), using tools that just weren't adequate, almost like building a US Interstate system before the automobile, or the Mayan pyramids built by a culture that did not have metalworking or the chisel. The results were incredibly impressive given the means, but part of the problem was that "Oz fans" weren't really a concept, not like the way Potter fans are now.
Yes, but without any of the 'merch' and other-media forms of Oz, though they did try to catch up starting in the 1960s. Stratemeyer publications are more usefully seen as in the pulp boys' magazine tradition, which starts in the 1870s. They didn't try to create a "world."
Even for Sherlock Holmes, I guess he also hoped to instruct the youth to proper British values and do poignant social critique (the story where the banker realizes he can make more as a pseudo-mendicant and so on) which obviously were not the ones which ended up being remembered.
I always wondered, why did he think his readers would prefer a cantankerous uncle tirade about kids these days rather than a detective story. Did he not realize it was a cantankerous uncle tirade? He thought there was no other source of avuncular commentary to be found?
Many people have a critique of society to be made in a "avuncular commentary."
Very few are Jonathan Swift.
Those who are, write scathing critiques of Congress that explain that since they can't get an omnibus together, they should all ride their own short buses.
... Congress did not get the joke, but they did get the point, as you can see with the "minibuses"
Come on that joke is clever but I doubt people will laugh at it 300 years later like we do with "a modest proposal".
And Doyle's moralizing stories don't even have much of humor element. I mean it's there if you squint enough, but maybe because he just wasn't much of an humorist, maybe because he was too absorbed by the moralizing to fully exploit the absurdity of the situations he concocted (the two things are in tension: if you focus on the absurdity, it's hard to convey how it Explains a Lot About Modern Times), but IMHO it shares something with the Scott Adams fiasco: man invents a new subgenre in which he excels, finds fame and riches through it, but decides to do something more "serious" at which he is mediocre at best. Even if you agree with Doyle's or SA positions, they are probably not your go-to examples of commentators, just stylistically speaking.
If people laugh about it 300 years later, it will be because it was the first step in fixing the Congressional Budgetary Issues (and because America still exists -- 300 years after Nero, nobody cared about him). There's a bit of an art in poking the people in charge, so that they actually fix impasses.
We do care about Nero, as proved by the fact most people would recognize the name (and even more would have when church attendance was higher and Sunday school a bit more graphic I guess).
And we don't laugh at "A Modest Proposal" because it maybe had some roles in swaying British policies in Ireland (arguably, it did not, just looking at the chronology), we do because it's a masterpiece. Juvenal never swayed anyone, to the extent he spoke ill of anyone he did so only *after* they were deposed and left no descendands, but we still read him because of sheer literary merit. On the other hand, plenty of pamplets that really did sway events (say, the STOP movement publications) are pretty dull and are only ever mentioned, never read.
He (Doyle) wrote the biggest English language Anti-Belgian Congo/King Leopold II book of the period, and was basically put on the Belgian govt’s shit list lol
Petrarch / Petrarca is eternally lionized here in Italy as a (the?) pinnacle of lyrical poetry in Italian (English speakers have no real access to the relevant poems, but know them indirectly as a major influence on Shakespeare's sonnets), but as a fan of Latin the man himself deemed his poetry in the vernacular lowly and trivial, and he thought his ticket to eternal glory would be his poetry in Latin, which hardly anyone has cared about in later centuries.
When you say relevant poems, are there others you have in mind not in Rime Sparse? I know Africa, his latin epic to which he pinned his hopes of glory, was last translated in the seventies, but are there other important pieces to which the English-speaking reader no access? Or was your comment more about translation; its lack of quality or inherent inability to preserve all poetic features?
There is no lack of translations into English of Petrarch's whole body of work, but they never manage to convey the poetic quality of the original, not even a faint shade of it. If you only read the translations you won't know why Petrarch is so celebrated in Italy.
That is a universal problem in poetic translations (including into Italian), but it's particularly bad with Petrarch.
Yes, very grave problem, for sure. I am starting to learn Italian (right now I only have english, french and spanish) to hopefully be able to read Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Bocaccio, Petrarch, and so on in the original, because it is clear, as is always so, much has been lost.
Are there underrated works of Petrarch you would recommend? I am reading a collection right now of his letters, which I believe he curated, which have been interesting.
And also, would you say that the poetic quality is largely a phonaesthetic or prosodic excellence, or does it depend on clever play with allusions and contemporary idioms. Obviously, the first is easier to learn to appreciate than the latter?
The lionization in Italy is not (only) because of his mastery of style (which is inconsistent, the Trionfi are admittedly, uh, a bit derivative) but because he basically created the language today we call Italian. After an heated debate in 1400s on what the Italian koiné should be, Bembo's position to just adopt Petrarchean style wholesale prevailed, and was adopted so enthusiastically that by the 1500s most published work, and even many private documents (eg contracts) were already written in Italian.
It doesn't really matter what you think of his poetry (the Trionfi are a bit, uh, derivative), much like it does not matter much what you think of Manzoni as a novelist, those guys (with honorable mention to the oft-neglected Goldoni) are the fathers of our literary culture. Arguably, of our entire national culture. This warrants a veneration that goes beyond literary merit per se.
Secondo me, se dici così agli stranieri, non capiscono. L'impressione che si formano leggendo le tue parole è che il Petrarca è un poeta come tanti, e l'unica ragione per cui è così famoso è che ha "creato l'italiano" tramite Bembo. Ma prova a leggere il Canzoniere accanto alle sue traduzioni in inglese. Fa quasi fisicamente male. Il punto è che se il suo stile è stato preso a modello letterario, è perché è *bellissimo*. A sostegno di questa opinione invoco l'autorità di Foscolo, Leopardi, D'Annunzio...
Comunque la lingua di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio aveva già ampiamente conquistato l'Italia ai tempi di Bembo. Il suo trattato in cui adotta la posizione di prendere Petrarca e Boccaccio a modello è del 1525. Cioè viene dopo l'Orlando Innamorato e l'Orlando Furioso, dopo l'Arcadia di Sannazzaro, dopo il Cortegiano, eccetera eccetera, insomma dopo mille opere scritte in toscano da non toscani. Anche l'uso dell'italiano nei documenti privati si era già affermato ampiamente ai tempi di Bembo, e certamente non aveva niente a che fare con il suo consiglio di versificare come il Petrarca, perché quel consiglio si applicava, e aveva senso, solo alla scrittura in *versi*. Quello che fece Bembo fu chiarire: quando scrivete in versi, il modello sia Petrarca, non Dante. Ma quanto conta oggi quell'opinione, visto che oggi Petrarca e Dante ci sembrano più o meno altrettanto lontani, o vicini, e quello che chiamiamo padre dell'italiano di solito è il secondo?
I Trionfi sono "uh, derivative" di che? delle terzine dantesche? se uno scrive in terzine un altro non può? scusa sai ma scrivili tu i Trionfi...
Sui Trionfi: vabbè de gustibus, personalmente l'ho trovato abbastanza pesante e francamente quasi autoparodico a tratti, con una struttura allegorica cervellotica e dottrinale. Non è un caso che anche nel periodo del petrarchismo più attivo, tutta la produzione letteraria ispirata ai Trionfi si sia ispirata così liberamente da trasformarsi in qualcosa di completamente diverso, una sorta di riconoscimento implicito del fatto che il Petrarca lirico fosse un sistema completo e autosufficiente, il Petrarca epico un esperimento abortivo che, eccetto qualche virtuosismo come quello di Colonna, non ha lasciato discendenti diretti (Pietrobon ha un articolo molto interessante al riguardo).
Comunque, argomento tangenziale a parte: sì assolutamente il Canzoniere ha avuto così tanto successo nel definire la nostra lingua grazie al suo successo letterario, dovuto alle sue virtù artistiche. Forse ancora più importante per il suo successo però, il liricismo petrarchesco è così versatile ma allo stesso tempo rigoroso da essere un "sistema", che si presta molto bene alla sensibilità manieristica. Una poesia può essere petrarchesca in una maniera in cui non potrà mai essere dantesca o boccacesca (beh può essere boccacesca ma significa un'altra cosa lol). Possiamo dire senza esagerare che nel tardo rinascimento _buona parte_ della produzione letteraria italiana fosse consciamente, volutamente imitativa. Concordo con te che la versione da liceo per cui Bembo semplicemente dichiara che la lingua petrarchesca sarà la koiné, Macchiavelli prova a ribattere ma non viene ascoltato, e finita lì è una semplificazione terribile. Bembo era semplicemente il più erudito e consapevole di un movimento stilistico a cui stava già aderendo buona parte dell'intelligentsia italiana.
Quindi no, Dante non è "tanto lontano da noi" quanto Petrarca. Secoli di letterati ispiratesi più all'uno che all'altro (possiamo dibattere quanto questo sia stato un accidente, o quanto sia il risultato delle rispettive scelte stilistiche e linguistiche) rendono Petrarca un autore leggibile da qualsiasi italiano istruito, Dante e Boccaccio autori che francamente sono letti più in nota che nel corpo del testo. Le Tre Corone hanno convinto l'italia a parlare toscano, ma solo Petrarca ha offerto una lingua abbastanza duttile da poter essere astratta dalle sue origini e diventare davvero nazionale.
After Stephen Sondheim died Steve Sailer and/or Mark Steyn said it was unfortunate that West Side Story was the last time Sondheim wrote lyrics for a Leonard Bernstein musical, since Sondheim was best as a lyricist despite his aspiration to writing melodies, and Bernstein was better at writing showtunes than the high-art he later aspired to (one of which was actually titled "Mass").
Sondheim's best friend as a schoolboy at the George School in Buck's County was the son of Oscar Hammerstein II, lyricist and book writer for Oklahoma, The King and I, Sound of Music, et al.
At age 15, Sondheim wrote the school musical comedy revue, "By George." Mr. Hammerstein had nice things to say until Sondheim demanded that he tell him what he _really_ thought. The great Hammerstein then gave the teen a 3 hour critique of everything wrong with his show. This could have destroyed the kid's confidence but instead it proved a landmark in Sondheim's development.
I wonder, though, whether Sondheim took from it the ambition to match not just Hammerstein but Rodgers as well.
And while Sondheim might have been either more brilliant than Hammerstein at lyric writing, unfortunately, Sondheim lacked Rodgers melodic gift.
Bernstein, on the other other hand, was, comparable. So, it's unfortunate that Bernstein and Sondheim didn't team up a few more times after West Side Story.
Bernstein was a fine enough composer; his first two symphonies are fine works in the mid-40s Yank symphonic style (the Third Symphony is an abortion), and some of his choral works (Chichester Psalms especially) are excellent (the Mass is very much not though). However, that does not change the fact that, as you say, he did have a real gift for lighter works (for example, the Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs, West Side Story of course, Candide, and so on).
All my life so far I have worked in very non-Dilbert workspaces, but I still loved his comics ever since I discovered them some time in 00's. Maybe as a reminder of how lucky I am, but frankly just because they were funny (the one about random numbers generator had me rolling). As a non-American, I didn't care about his politics, so I was just sad at his cancellation. But his obsession with hypnosis always weirded me out.
I've thought about it so many times and I still don't know the context for why Dilbert is beaten up and the other characters are some kind of monster or demon. Is he in hell? I have no idea, it probably made sense if you saw the prior strips.
I think it's from when he goes to accounting because of an error and gets taken prisoner by the trolls in accounting. It has one of my other favorite comics. Dogbert comes up to a troll with a spear guarding a door and says, "I hear you have Dilbert prisoner in there, let him go or I'll put this baseball cap on backwards and your little hardwired accounting brain will explode." In the next panel Dilbert is hanging upside down over a lot and Dogbert is standing next to him wearing a backwards baseball cap. Dilbert asks, "what was that popping sound?" And Dogbert says, "A paradigm shifting without a clutch."
I don't know much about the original work of Omar Khayyam, but the translations by Edward Fitzgerald (from 1859 & following) are famous in English, reportedly have fairly little to do with the original. I think they're great. One important thing to note is that he released four major versions and they changed a lot; you'll see stanzas quoted, search a text, and not find it, because it was from a later edition. All four editions of Fitzgerald's translations are on Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam_(tr._Fitzgerald)
I believe he is paraphrasing Saint Faustina "The greater the sinner, the greater his right to God's mercy," or maybe someone else who paraphrased her and Scott quoted them.
We're around the same age, and I was also obsessed with Dilbert in elementary and middle school. I had a Dogbert plush that I carried around. As someone who followed his career and writing almost from the beginning, you've captured Adams better than any tribute I've seen. Thank you.
This is a good tribute though I disagree with SA's somewhat reductionist interpretation of who Scott Adams was to a lot of people. The best obituary I've seen on him so far was actually in the Deseret News since it focused more on how he faced his own death with dignity and resolve: https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2026/01/13/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-life-lessons/
I have followed Scott Adams's podcast, in and out, since Covid, and given my more post-rationalist predilections, smoothed over some of the types of rough spots pointed out by SA in this piece. Of course, the "racist" tirade was more of a racial statement in response to a poll, that with additional context, may have not been what Adams thought it was (and also he at that point knew he had terminal cancer, so maybe was in a YOLO state of mind).
There's so much good here, I should have been taking notes. More comments will follow.
Peg Bracken's _I Hate To Cook Book_ was an earlier version of telling the truth about mainstream demands. It was simple recipes and hacks based on the premise that women don't necessarily want to cook.
I cracked up at the puffer fish cartoon. Adams really was brilliant at his best.
Scott, my condolences on choosing an ordinary-name pseud and then being confused with someone else who has a similar name because there are so many people with similar names.
One of my commenters pointed out that Adams wrote good books about how to live with ADHD.
Figuring out how the omnipresent God can make room for imperfect creation isn't just a Jewish problem. Muslims have theology about it, too. Don't ask me to do the subject justice. I'm not sure whether Christians take a crack at it.
Considered as a rhyme, "If God is so smart, why do we fart?" is a failure. Maybe something broken about the rhythm.
I will keep hammering on the question of why G-d didn't tell the Israelites to boil the drinking water.
I'm hoping this is publicly available. Laurenton was a leftist, but was very disappointed that other leftists refused to believe there was serious violence happening with the BLM protests.
She got canceled, and got little or no support. When she came back strong, she was accepted by high-status feminists. It was fun, but she didn't trust them.
She swung right, and got seriously involved with Curtis Yarvin. And pregnant by him. He sued her two weeks after she gave birth.
She got canceled by the right.
Some people helped her, but very few. She found she couldn't predict who would help her.
******
"Why is a land holy?: strikes me as a very interesting question sociologically, but it's about people, not about some intrinsic quality of the land.
In re reading the books: it was Peanuts for me. And the world might have been a better place when someone could say "There's a little bit of Charlie Brown in all of us" rather than feeling that Charlie Brown is depressed and should get on meds ASAP.
I might want to read Adams' books on how to be funny.
I recently posted a comment on the UK Mail Online website to the effect that the best cure for kids' ADHD was a birch (which I sincerely believe, as it is a concocted non-condition to label no more than a flighty lack of mental discipline).
I was expecting a deluge of down ticks, but to my surprise there were only a few and these were far outnumbered by loads of upticks! So I guess a lot of MO readers agree.
Which is why, of course, it responds to a variety of medications (including ones people without it do not respond to), and why you can actually spot differences in brain scans between people with it and without. Because a whole bunch of people are just making up their symptoms.
Mail Online readers are somewhere to the right of Hitler politically, but with worse fashion sense and less concern for others. Earning their approval is the sort of thing that should prompt a rethink of your life.
Perhaps the first thing I ever read by Scott Alexander was an essay on LessWrong about how questions like "is ADHD a disease?" are mostly just confusion.
Yes, many people possess a flighty lack of mental discipline, just like some people lack strength. If you really want to fix your child's mental discipline without Adderall, there are actual practices to try, which don't have much to do with the birch, just like how, if you want to fix your child's weakness without steroids, beating them is at best a small part of a larger program.
An elder ADHD acquaintance who went to school back when they could hit the children still preferred the paddle to sitting still for the length of a class, and chose it nearly every day for the entirety of school.
The note about the opening to God's Debris applied more strongly to his attempt to rise to punditry. Relatively early in his blogging days, he started saying that he didn't necessarily believe everything he said; he just said it to make people think. In my day, we tended to call that "trolling." He started being really explicit about that approach during Trump's rise, making A LOT of unfalsifiable predictions of the format: "I'm not saying X is going to happen, but if it does, it is because of Y." If X happens, he claims to be right; if X does not and you claim that he predicted X, you didn't read the full sentence. "I'm not saying Trump is going to win, but if he does, it is because he uses this technique..."
Stewart Lee's *How I Escaped My Certain Fate* is another example of a humorist annotating his comedy at extreme levels of granularity, including a section on why "wool" is a funny word. I found it very interesting. Lee's powers have declined, but the book includes many of his best standup sets, which were exceptional.
I always get Canadian influencer Jessica Mulroney confused with former (?) TS celebrity Dylan Mulvaney. Whenever I see one or the other it amazes me how makeup can make faces look so different to my previous recollection of her.
Apologies in advance if this post causes others to suddenly start confusing these two when they never did before!
Back in the twentieth century, my wife gave me a Dilbert book, perhaps the first. I worked for a scientific publisher that had just been bought by a much larger scientific publisher; I was a copy editor, a classic "technical competence" job. I read a good chunk of Dilbert, decided it was too much like my actual work environment to be funny, and brought it in and put it on the reference shelves, anonymously.
When my employers outsourced copy editing, they sent me to a career search training workshop. It didn't actually help me with getting work (the most useful book I ever read for business purposes was Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior), but I learned about the concept of career anchors. One of them was the technical competence anchor, for people who want to master a skill and use it productively (very much me). Another was managerial competence, for people who want to learn how to run things. It struck me that businesses seemed to be run by managerial competence types, who thought that the best reward was to be given the job of managing other people, so they provided that to technical competence types, to whom managing was annoying drudgery, a little of which was needed to get the real job done. . . . I actually saw a co-worker whom I had helped train climb that ladder and be happy at doing so, so I guess it works for some people; I had gotten promoted to developmental editor, a job that suited me much better until it was abolished as unnecessary to modern scientific publishing.
> It struck me that businesses seemed to be run by managerial competence types, who thought that the best reward was to be given the job of managing other people
Yeah. Generally, it seems like these types frequently fail at modeling people different from themselves. They seem to assume that everyone is extraverted, wants to spend as much time as possible doing various social activities, enjoys working in open spaces, wants to spend their free time doing teambuilding activities, etc.
Things like "could you please stop talking for a few minutes so that I can focus on doing some actual work" seems incomprehensible to them. From their perspective, "work" means talking about stuff, making sure everyone has the same vibes, motivating each other by saying motivational things, etc. Which I guess is true about their work, but that does not apply to everyone.
>I don’t know how the musicians and athletes cope. I hear stories about washed-up alcoholic former high school quarterbacks forever telling their girlfriends about how if Coach had only put them in for the last quarter during the big game, things would have gone differently. But since most writers are nerds, it’s the nerds who dominate the discussion, so much so that the whole affair gets dubbed “Former Gifted Kid Syndrome”.
Reminds me of Snow Crash:
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the
right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I
moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years.
if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to
revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping
out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
It isn't, it's when the protagonist (named Hiro Protagonist. Really.) meets someone who he realizes takes that role. He doesn't get to think that anymore because the role is taken.
These days that role is jokingly taken by Chuck Norris.
imagine if there were someone who you could tell Chuck Norris jokes about and receive only serious nods and "Yup. Saw him do that. I'm the only survivor." in return.
I think it's a pretty widespread phenomenon, but as you put it, most writers are nerds, and so the people who most define their identities in terms of violence and physical prowess are mostly not the ones dominating textual discussion.
It reminded me of a West Wing quote: "You know, there comes a day in every man’s life, and it’s a hard day, but there comes a day when he realizes he’s never going to play professional baseball."
Lines like that are memorable because they suddenly put words to a trend you've been noticing for ages and a million examples. The Trope Namer doesn't create the trope.
Given it's such a universal experience, why did nobody write about it until 1992? Why didn't Shakespeare write about it?
Why isn't there a passage in Homer where Alcathous or something realises "Holy shit, I'm really never going to be as good as Achilles, or even Hector"?
Good point. And Alexander, who had no greater forebears to compare himself to, still managed to cry when he compared himself to some kind of hypothetical super-Alexander who had conquered even more by an even younger age.
>In the other direction, we have a pull to focus not on Alexander, but on his father, Philip II, most notably in the work of Eugene Borza, In the Shadow of Olympus (1990). That focus has tended to see Philip as the more interesting figure than Alexander, as Philip is the fellow that built the unbeatable military system Alexander would employ; Alexander merely pulls the trigger on an invasion Philip had already designed, with an army he had already built, commanded by officers he had already trained, backed by a political structure in Greece he had already secured.
I was reminded of this passage from Mishima's "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea"
At twenty, he had been passionately certain: there’s just one thing I’m destined for and that’s glory; that’s righty glory! He had no idea what kind of glory he wanted, or what kind he was suited for. He knew only that in the depths of the world’s darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near some day to irradiate him and no other.
The point of light is of course realized through the sailor's own destruction.
Oh man, I see a lot of myself in this portrayal of Adams, even though my politics differ from his and (I'd like to think) my personal flaws aren't nearly as extreme.
I think nerds are very prone to overcontrol traits, and Adams is an extreme case of this. They cope with disappointment and hardships by trying to exert more control over themselves and the world. For nerds specifically, the tool of control is obsessive thought and raw intelligence. There's a feeling that you can achieve any goal if you analyze and systematize it enough. Accepting or working with your limitations is not an option.
This is especially insidious because many of us don't encounter the limitations of these traits until adulthood. They work plenty well for succeeding in school, and even in many early-career, individual contributor roles. At that point it becomes easier to think these traits stopped being useful for you because you're not applying them hard enough, or because there's something wrong with most other people, than to think that your approach to life may have flaws or limitations.
Scott mentions that many nerds cope with this by swinging the other way, and embracing EQ or ADHD diagnoses or critiques of modernism. While there might be some wisdom in these approaches, I think many of these jaded nerds are still exhibiting flawed, overly rigid thinking about the problems of rational modernism.
It's interesting, I think I'm very obviously a nerd, but I don't recognize myself in "They cope with disappointment and hardships by trying to exert more control over themselves and the world"
Not to say I don't have any tendencies like that, but I think my variety of nerd-dom is more... Passive? Less agentic? Less interested in controlling the world than in understanding it? I'm usually ok with some disappointment if I can understand why it happened; if I can convince myself that it had to be this way because of general principles or blah blah blah.
You're just a laid back nerd. We exist and actually in large numbers, though tend to less hostility online for obvious reasons. Which is too bad bc at this point I've almost become a nerd-hater, solely bc the loudest ones online are so overrepresentative of the narcissistic/dominance-oriented/hostile variety.
But this seems like a compulsive behavior that can really bite you in the ass, when you don't have time/energy/guidance/data/textbooks (to escape from the problem) to understand (or otherwise engage with) Some Bad Thing.
Also as we see with the dear Other people, they (!) don't have a problem with obviously (!!) false explanations. (I mean confirmation bias, echo chambers, etc.)
I think it's important to contrast your "passivity" with the general population, where the norm is the complete abso-fucking-lutely gaping absence of the need for understanding. (The majority is really silent. They have kids, work, family, snow to shovel, grass to cut, whatever, they do things, listen to a podcast during commute, and that's it.)
They don't read strange rationalist blogs and don't comment about how passive they are, no? :)
Some serious insight here that I only can see with hindsight as a 53 year old. "{Nerds] cope with disappointment and hardships by trying to exert more control over themselves and the world... it becomes easier to think these traits stopped being useful for you because you're not applying them hard enough" That's a potent summary of my first 40 years. It was only because of sufficient failures that I started to question my "intelligence" and began developing some wisdom. I imagine that would have been much harder and might never have happened if I had achieved the success and fame Scott Adams did.
I identify with a lot of this, especially having been a Dilbert-reading nerd in my teens. Ninety percent of this essay is brilliant — smarter and realer than anything anyone else has written about Adams — but the end lost me. It's too generous, to the point of being a whitewash. Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism. I don't think it's right to "hand it to him."
I was going to say that ~40% of american blacks disagreeing with "it's okay to be white" seemed legitimately disturbing to me if you apply any kind of literal interpretation to the sentiment. How do you cease being white, exactly?
I don't really get how this is responding to my comment, but I would say obviously it is not appropriate to apply a literal interpretation that is completely devoid of context.
I'm suggesting that we might have a very different perception of what qualifies as hateful or 'fascist'. "It's okay to be white" should be considered a totally unobjectionable statement, end of story.
Sure, and if you take them purely literally, the 14 words ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children") are also unobjectionable. But words and phrases have meanings, sometimes quite obvious ones, beyond their literal definitions.
I thought the original context/subtext behind "it's ok to be white" was "many Americans nowadays are so radicalized on the subject of race that even such a mundane statement engenders feelings of irrational hostility, thus by putting up posters with this slogan on it around college campuses and cities as a prank, we can observe the overreaction, have a laugh, and maybe change some minds by showing how crazy these people are". Is there some context I'm missing?
They are unobjectionable. It's the reflexive consignment of any non-fascist who articulates that sentiment into the same bucket that guarantees you will have no way to separate fascism from reasonable demands for national or ethnic autonomy.
Probably better to use an example with reversed politics to get them to understand. Like asking them why so many people disagree with "black lives matter".
The stereotypical response to "black lives matter" from the enemies of the political movement is "yes, all lives matter," i.e., agreement with the surface text but disagreement with the more radical claim it implies. Is there a response to use to "it's OK to be white" that similarly reflects agreement with the surface text but disagreement with the more radical claim it implies?
That was Ilya's original point, that--though the words are unobjectionable in themselves--context matters. Maybe you're not familiar with the context of this saying? It is such a core and well-known white supremacist slogan that any white supremacist (or white nationalist, as they often call themselves now) knows what you mean if you say "14 words" and will assume that you are one of them. It's practically a password.
The *point* is that it's technically, in a vacuum, true and harmless, but *in context* it means some quite disturbing things beneath the surface.
The trouble with "It's okay to be white" is that a phrase like this, when put on a billboard or used as a slogan, is presenting itself as a corrective. The message of the phrase "Black lives matter" is unequivocally "the police have been acting as though black lives don't matter, as though it's not as big a deal to kill a black person as a white person, and that must change." The slogan "All lives matter"--literally true as it is--presented itself as a corrective to "Black lives matter," thus implying that the point of "BLM" was a different one, namely the idea that ONLY black lives matter. In a somewhat similar way, "It's okay to be white" implies "broad and powerful swathes of the culture has been telling you it's bad and not okay to be white, and so this simple and obviously true statement is needed as a corrective." It's not just a simple, obviously true, neutral statement about being white--in *context*, it's a political statement, just like all the others quoted here.
I say this as someone who wrote a blog post titled "It's Okay To Be White." Which made the points I've made above along with the point that it is indeed literally and simply okay to be white.
I feel like this is missing the point. If you treat the polling result with a pinch of grace, it seems clear that the 40% in question is simply people who are aware that the phrase "It's okay to be white" implies the speaker is very right-wing, and generally has certain beliefs about race that go beyond the object-level content of the sentence. No one who had heard the phrase was evaluating it on its literal content, which is hardly a unique artifact of black people. See also every poll taken once something Trump says has percolated enough that everyone understands the poll is *actually* asking about whether you like Trump.
It's not at all hard to discern the intent of announcing "It's okay to be white" without being familiar with 4chan. All you need is American culture. Were most white people you know mystified by the phrase "Black lives matter"? If you announce a simple, obvious thing like that, you are implying that a lot of people think, or act like, it's untrue.
This is obvious to me and I know almost nothing of 4chan.
One thing that high-decouplers can never wrap their head around is that in low-decoupler English, phrases often don't mean what you would get by a mechanistic analysis of the grammar and the words contained in them. In fact, it is almost impossible to convey a meaning like the one "it's okay to be white" has when evaluated under mechanistic semantics in LDE at all. (What a clunky language!)
At the very least, a rule like the following is in place as part of LDE semantics: every phrase that sounds like a political slogan includes in its meaning the assertion that this phrase "needs to be said", that is, that there is a significant number of people who disagree with it and need to be opposed. You are interacting with people in whose language there is no short utterance that means "it's okay to be white" as you understand it, and who moreover confusingly have an identical-*sounding* utterance that means (in your language) "there are some people who think it's not okay to be white, and we need to put them in their place".
And more confusingly ... we have no idea when a phrase becomes this politically charged. (Sure, if suddenly Trump starts to use this maybe. But going to some random street corner and asking people one questions, it's very hard to gauge their semantics. Well to be fair, there are some people who do wear their affiliations on themselves. The stereotypical archetypes, but even then it's not clear how up to date they are with the ideology, etc.)
I actually found Adams' reaction to this a bit crazy - the poll was that 20% of blacks were against the phrase and 20% unsure, with 60% saying it was okay. I bet those are better numbers than you could get among white people!
For white people, the stats were signifcantly better: 81% agreed, 7% disagreed, 13% not sure.
It doesn't help that the “unsure” option here is pretty damning in itself.
If I stated that I'm unsure if women deserve voting rights, unsure if black people are inferior to whites, unsure if homosexuals should be stoned to death, and unsure if Hitler killed enough Jews, would you think of me as an unusually wishywashy respondent, or would you think I was one of the worst people you ever encountered?
So I definitely understand the concern about the outcome of the poll _when taken literally_. What keeps me sane is the assumption that most people who answered "disagree" or "not sure" did not want to be seen as endorsing a 4chan trolling campaign (but even then, the number of "strongly disagrees" is concerning).
This is itself a pretty silly read of the poll though. It's a bit like polling conservatives on the phrase "black lives matter". Approximately no one thinks that the question is actually about the truth value of the phrase, and people answered accordingly
I explicitly acknowledged that at the end of my comment.
I'm still not happy about it, because of how selective this argument is made. We can both do the thought experiment where pollsters ask white people “black lives matter: agree or disagree?” (which is something they haven't done, as far as I know: they ask explicitly about the Black Lives Matter movement/organization which is a different thing. I strongly agree that black lives matter, but I disagree with the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement such as defunding the police, and on a poll I would not substitute the latter for the former).
Then imagine it turns out only about half of white people agree that black lives matter (because they interpret the question as support for #BLM), and a black cartoonist crashes out about it online, saying he doesn't feel safe living in a white neighborhood when apparently half of his white neighbors doesn't believe his life matters, and so on.
What do you now think would happen in this race swapped scenario? Would the consensus be that he was overreacting, because obviously when whites say black lives don't matter, they only mean they don't want to defund the police, and actually he is the racist for even thinking they would be so callous, so his cartoons get pulled from publication, etc.?
I think we both know the answer to that. And it's that double standard that people are getting increasingly tired of: an ostensibly racist or unfair statement made about white people is always something white people aren't allowed to get upset about because <insert postmodern sophistry about privilege that people are also fed up with>, while anything a white person says can be taken in the worst way and none of the excuses you'd make for black people would ever apply to white people.
I do think that Adams was stupid for taking the bait, when there seems to be no upside to it. He should have known that as a white guy he would be vilified for calling black people racist, whether he was right or wrong. The only explanation I have is that he let his emotions get the better of him. He was only human, after all, or the whatever lesser animal white people are allowed to call themselves these days.
> "I think we both know the answer to that. And it's that double standard that people are getting increasingly tired of: an ostensibly racist or unfair statement made about white people is always something white people aren't allowed to get upset about because <insert postmodern sophistry about privilege that people are also fed up with>, while anything a white person says can be taken in the worst way and none of the excuses you'd make for black people would ever apply to white people."
Honestly, I have trouble considering your hypothetical. It's a silly one.
Black people make up 13% of the country. Only 6% of _that_ number make over 100k on an individual basis (so .007% of the total pop). Even if I grant that sociopolitical context doesn't matter at all (though obviously it does; as an intuition pump, a billionaire stating "fuck the poor" rings differently from a poor person stating "fuck the rich"), trying to imagine such and such person who is at all relevant in the public sphere who hypothetically has a crash out is silly, because that person doesn't exist. You have to come up with a hypothetical person to justify dismissing the seriousness of the actual, real person saying actual, real heinous things that is in front of you. This is fake grievance.
Fwiw the only people who can get away with saying shit like what you're implying are professional activists. Colin Kaepernick did far less and the President of the country demanded he be fired, which he was
You are buying the line from malicious journalists. He never did anything viscous or hateful. He just said the things that the progressives don't want you to be allowed to say.
Yeah, I got this feeling, too. I don't think it was the author's intent, but he did end up saying some apologist/sympathizer statements that really diminish what Scott Adams stood for.
"Adams is easy and fun to mock - as is everyone who lives their life uniquely and unapologetically."
- He's easy to mock because he's said horribly racist bullshit. He was not being mocked due to little quirks or differences.
"And whatever the value of his ideas, the community seems real and loving."
- It's likely the community had elements of love, especially towards on another. But when you speak hateful messages, you're going to have a community built on the basis of accepting and maybe even reveling in bigotry.
I think the author really should've actually sat more with what he "didn't want to learn" from Scott Adams. He alludes to it, but the post itself mostly focuses on the positives without actually delving into the hateful bigotry that Scott Adams perpetrated unapologetically.
He straight up said that white people shouldn't interact with black people, and that black people should be defined as a hate group. This was based off a poll that sampled 130 Black Americans (which is ~.00026% of Black Americans) and asks them if a white supremacist phrase that originated from 4chan is ok.
What part of that is reasonable? What part of that isn't racist?
Mfw a normie blue-triber comes into the ACX comments section.
I mean, I think you're doing fine, we've just have our own set common shared beliefs, which just happen to include, "acknowledging that racism is bad, but not really having a strong reaction to it".
I imagine most of the ACX readership is middle to upper-middle class whites and Asians, so we don't usually experience these things on a really personal level. So instead we take a more "outside view" look at this general trend of people getting canceled and pivoting to being right wing "grifters" - it happens so often that it's hard to decry it as (entirely) personally failing and instead a feature of the system. Scott (Alexander) says as much in the article itself. I mean Scott (Alexander, and also kind of Aaronson) himself/themselves was/were cancelled for his/their comments of feminism, but both resisted being right-wing grifters (I'd say, especially Aaronson).
(I will say, experiencing anti Indian racism over these last few months has immediately made me much more empathetic to the woke left. So consider this a data point that perhaps in the name of epistemic humility we in the ACX commentariat reconsider our priors)
Maybe I'm naive, but I think it should be pretty easy to stake a position which is opposed to actual racism without engaging in the abuses of the woke left, and I think less of the woke left for not taking such a position.
> I think it should be pretty easy to stake a position which is opposed to actual racism without engaging in the abuses of the woke left
I basically tautologically agree that the abuses were bad (thus the word "abuses"). But also, being more empathetic, I understand more viscerally why/how they happened. And having gone through that experience, I think it is really hard to understand how it feels until you have actual elected officials calling your ethnic group racial slurs and demanding your / your family's deportation.
It's generous to assume that he independently reinvented Lurianic Kabbalah - more likely he read about it in New Age/metaphysical book and repackaged it.
1. "This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all."
Compare with the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers.
2. "I only know about this because Scott Adams would start each of his book collections with an essay, and sometimes he would talk about letters he got from fans, and many of them would have stories like these."
Adams had a public email address where readers could email him stories of workplace cluelessness. Adams used much of this as fodder for Dilbert strips, and said that he had more than he could use in several lifetimes, the only challenge was to cherrypick the best.
3. Adams' philosophical works sound like someone trying to be Socrates and getting a Temu version of same.
"Adams used much of this as fodder for Dilbert strips, and said that he had more than he could use in several lifetimes, the only challenge was to cherrypick the best."
I think he also said there were some he couldn't use because they were too extreme.
In fairness to the "one time the manager leaves and everyone becomes 10x as productive" gag, when my manager at Google had a month's leave this absolutely happened. If you've only ever had good or at least okay managers this probably sounds like an exaggeration (this wouldn't have happened with anyone else I've worked for) but there absolutely are managers whose absence can drive productivity like this.
*EDIT* Did the strips change during a reload? There was a black-and-white one about founding a start-up while still working at their current company but I don't see it any more
Also republicans were hunted. Jan 6 was that hunt. I can’t respect the politics of ignorance any more than you respect Scott’s insights into our political zeitgeist. It’s truly amazing how many otherwise smart people make the assumption that politics is anything other than persuasion in service of incentives. And then pretend the incentives don’t exist, and democracy is real. All with the smug assumption that their unexamined beliefs make them “good.” Is the virtue signaling anti racist who uses the correct pronouns but stays far far away from the people he champions any better than someone like Scott, who dared to say something aloud that might easily be viewed as common sense? How many middle and upper class blacks feel the same way about hate whitey? How many smug smarties are eager to live among people who think hate is okay? Are we allowed to admit that racist blacks exist? Perhaps you assume that potentially hurty words are worse than being able to speak about uncomfortable topics, even at the cost of being wrong? Or is that - gasp - right wing? I enjoyed most of your essay and if Scott still exists in some form he’s surely laughing his ass off to see you fall into the same trap you diagnose in him.
"Also republicans were hunted. Jan 6 was that hunt."
They were not being hunted in January 6th. Except the vice-President, whom I recall the mob breaking into the Capitol were shouting that they wanted to hang.
Jan 6 was a hunt of both Republicans and Democrats that some people wanted to kill. Trump pardoned the hunters in order to express dominance over both Republicans and Democrats.
Were there or were there not calls to hang Mike Pence? Were there or were there not people tearing off bits of furniture inside the capitol building? Who has actually been hunting Republicans?
I'm not sure what pipe bombs you're talking about, but there were many people who tried to break into the Capitol to attack Republicans and Democrats, and they all got pardons.
You're telling me you don't know why the FBI wasn't at the capital? There were pipe bombs planted at the DNC and RNC (presumably not by the "mob" because that would actually imply planning -- and they did eventually "catch the guy").
He tweeted that his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within a year” - next tweet "Republicans will be hunted". J6 is not an example of Republicans being hunted and killed en masse, is it?
also, didn't Biden have a minor scandal in 2012 where he claimed that a Romney win would "put black people back in chains"? Point being that political partisans of all stripes make inflammatory exaggerated claims and predictions all the time. I did not see Scott Adams' prediction as particularly exceptional in that respect. Ideologues gonna ideologue.
Funny coincidence - The past days I had a similar long lasting back and forth with ChatGPT, wife and The Internet (TM) over Adams. Besides Adams had demasked himself as a moron past years Pascals Wager was one of the main themes. I even put your extremely long post into this exact chat and just asked: "what is Scott saying about this? <link>".
And we had this line:
"With hindsight, his talent for caricaturing dysfunctional personalities reads less like satire and more like unusually honest introspection.
...
Over time, it becomes hard to tell where observation ended and self-description began."
Our chat endet like this:
"The irony is hard to miss:
A man who spent his life claiming to see through cognitive fallacies ended up relying on one of the oldest and most controversial fallacies in philosophy."
My new long-term chat is called:
“How to avoid falling into the hubris trap as an above-average intelligent white male over 50 who has been building his own internal world model for decades.”
Turns out the hardest alignment problem is aligning your own world model with reality.
one, I'm not particularly surprised about the Lurian Kabbalah variations in a book written by a gentile - apparently those ideas have made the round in Western esotericism for a while; I first heard of "kliffoth" through the Swedish metal band Therion (whose lyrics are basically an anthology of esoteric and mythological concepts). Since then, I have learned that the idea that the divine fragments try to reassemble into a self-aware universe where God can see himself is fundamental in many flavors of gnosticism, including Hegel and Marx.
Second, while Adams was initially somewhat vague about whether he supported Trump, he clearly admired the skill he saw in him; what was conspicuously absent from his analysis was any worry whether Trump would use his powers for good or evil. The notion of Trump as an extremely skilled manipulator has stood the test of time, though - that a New York real estate billionaire with well-known connections to organized crime was elected because he was seen as a champion of the common man against the corrupt elites is so absurd, I can't really find a better explanation.
What makes you think the common man doesn't want a criminal in charge?
America only has two political parties, so politics is a zero sum game. It is not surprising things go to extremes. It is only surprising it has taken this long. Clearly, the elites were saving democracy in America from the American people.
His popularity fell when the median voter thought he was to blame for any price rises. It did not fall when the median voter saw his supporters storm the Capitol screaming that they wanted to hang the vice-President. That was something the median voter cared nothing about, and the median Republican primary voter was enthusiastic about.
Indeed, in reality I think there's barely a bee's dick of difference between the two parties in the US.
The only extreme thing about US politics is the extremity of the feelings that people have about the miniscule differences between the parties. The actual policy differences are barely existent.
The para that begins "The final quarter of the book is a shockingly original take on the Lurianic kabbalah" seems to be a good match to some elements of Dune post-God Emperor.
Fascinating, learn something new every day etc etc.
Reading the dilbert blog from 2016-2018, I kept waiting for deep insight that never arrived. His attitude - I’m too brilliant to have to explain and specify my ideas coherently - is a sign that the wizard pose is all there is, and you should stop reading. Frank Lloyd Wright was proud his buildings didn’t work because they were really works of art. Maybe, or perhaps the disfunctionality is evidence that he’s a bad architect and the marketing is all there is. Scott Adams claimed to be a master of marketing / bullshit in a world built upon and full of bullshit. Great, but since it’s admittedly bullshit, maybe it’s better direct attention towards those who build on solid intellectual grounds, whose buildings never have leaks nor gaps between walls that don’t fit together.
To share a different perspective on Adams, my uncle was an avid follower. He went from being a principled libertarian whose ideas I respected very much to (I'm sad to say) an alt right bigot. Under the influence of Adams, he had no interest anymore in objective truth or the actual scientific method. Reality was all a matter of spin and "persuasion."
The phrase "post truth" gets thrown around too much, but Adams fit that description perfectly.
Yeah, one thing I failed to really address is the weird conflict between Adams saying all the right stuff (talking about how you need to be data-driven, not let your partisanship get the better of you, be really careful with the mentally corrosive effects of social media, etc), and having unbelievably stupid takes on social media that were obviously his letting his partisanship get the better of him. I didn't address it because I mostly tuned out of Adams after he went crazy, and also because I don't understand it. The best I can do is a combination of "he got old" and "you need to be rational -> I am more rational than other people -> in order to prove this, I must show myself right more often than the experts -> being easy prey for any form of dumb contrarianism that comes along". I still don't feel like I really understand it.
There was definitely an effect of "If the experts aren't all they're cracked up to be, the conspiracy theorists must therefore be right about everything."
When I thought about it, I realized I was rather zoomed out myself, but I'm going to kick the idea round with examples of other people and see what turns up.
Rush Limbaugh-- I first got interested in the idea of influence by the audience when I was working up a good hate against Rush Limbaugh, and then I realized he couldn't become !Rush! !Limbaugh! without an audience who wanted to hear the kind of thing he said. It's very flattening to start to work up a good hate and then realize it's not entirely justified.
Wim Hof, the cold water plunge guy, who I've mostly learned about from Scott Carney. While there were some things wrong with Hof, Carney says that part of what went wrong was the demand for new and more extreme material because the algorithm gets bored. Combining hyperventilation with being in cold water has killed some people.
Candace Owens, who has been making more and more extreme claims without evidence and is now facing a lawsuit from the Macrones because she insists Brigitte Macrone is really a man (don't ask unless you want a distraction from current politics). Is Owens large audience just watching her for the crazy, or do they believe her? Probably some of both.
So, Adams. There's certainly an audience for pro-Trump material, but perhaps Adams' audience's worst influence was tolerating him being mediocre at great length.
One of Scott Adams's beliefs, which he talked about a lot, is that there's no such thing as free will, it's just an illusion. I don't really agree with him on that, but I have to say that his life story kind of makes me wonder if he was on to something there. It seems like a guy who was very self-aware about all of his problems, knew what he should do to avoid them, and then... did them anyway. It's like those people who go into a casino and say "I'm just here for the experience, I'm not going to waste my money gambling" and then very quickly go broke gambling all their money away.
There's even something he wrote (I think on his blog? I'm not sure, it was many years ago) that seems to forewarn his later fall from grace. He wrote something like "I've accepted that, no matter what I do, I'll always just be known as 'that Dilbert guy.' Nothing else I try will really catch on. Unless maybe I go crazy and stab someone to death, then I'd be known as 'that stabbin' Dilbert guy.' " He seemed fully aware that he'd never get famous for anything other than Dilbert unless it was epicly bad. I wonder how that younger version of him would feel about all the newspaper obituaries that basically refer to him as "That racist Dilbert guy."
I think Adams is basically correct. Yes, facts and evidence do exist and are real; but they have virtually no impact on anything socially important -- i.e., on anything important whatsoever. Memes and charisma and persuasion are what matters if you want to achieve life goals that extend beyound yourself and your immediate family.
For example, even if you were some kind of an esoteric weirdo whose one ambition in life is to build a fusion reactor, then sure, you'll need to learn a lot of facts about magnetic fields and plasma densities and so on. But you'll also need a team. You'll need funding. You'll likely need government support. Even if you do manage to build this fusion thing by yourself in a cave with a box of scraps, you'll need marketing and word of mouth, or else the world will never know about your brilliant invention and thus remain unchanged. The ability to gather all those things, and ultimately to get people to follow you, is what truly matters. If you are especially good at it, you won't even need to worry about any plasma containment. After all, every minute that you spend in the lab is a minute you don't spend on changing the world.
Not really; you just need to be better at not getting caught. The majority of the startup industry is built on this principle: you show some flashy demo, get a bunch of funding, get acquired and successfully exit, repeat. Let someone else deal with the mess of your promised AI-driven blockchain biohacking bracelet or whatever, it's not your problem anymore...
As someone in the startup industry, I disagree that the majority of the startup industry is built on this principle. It's just the stuff that gets reported, because that's how media always works
Maybe Holmes' problem wasn't that she was a fraud, it was that she trying to produce a real product which could be proven to not work. If she'd aimed for something vaguer, she wouldn't be in prison.
I think it's something like "The world would be great if we were rational -> Some people are stopping rational people from making it great -> I should fight against these people -> (partisan takes)"
You seem to believe we should fight against irrationality purely with rationality, but I think Adams wouldn't have shared your belief. He would believe you need to win by any means, and once the enemies are out of the way, then we can have our good and rational world.
As described, his conclusion bears some similarity to Haidt's in The Righteous Mind -- people's decisions are emotional judgments, merely cloaked in reason. Certainly this allowed him to see Trump's political potential. But Haidt could have told Adams that Adams, no less than anyone else, was prone to letting his emotions drive the intellect that he thought he exalted. And so he went from "Trump has a better shot than you think" to "my new fans like me much more than my old ones, and have a bunch of appealingly contrarian medical advice." Alas.
Once you disagree with the mainstream and become famous for it, you start getting constant social reinforcement to disagree with the mainstream even more. Apparently most people can't resist that pressure.
Which kinda makes it interesting that *you* seem to mostly resist the pressure. My guess is that it helps a lot to have an offline community which knew you before that happened.
I've got a relative or two like that as well. In an era of disheartening things that weird slide from principled libertarian to whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it among people I love and respect has been the most disheartening for me. Gives me "there but for the grace of God go I" type vibes.
It's why post trump adams got old very fast. He would claim anything he said was just aimed at persuasion or 4d chess, and would just shrug off any factual errors.
It is very hard to have worthwhile conversations with people like that! In my experience there ends up being a lot of "ends justify the means" type sentiment as well. "That thing he said isn't true!" "Well, sure, not literally true but just having said it has all these positive third-order effects!"
Thanks for writing this. I'd been feeling a little mixed-up about how to feel about Scott Adams. He was somehow a big part of our lives, I felt, but I knew he had taken a bad rightward turn and fallen from grace (as it were). It reminds me a little of when Michael Jackson died. Anyway, you've helped me (as well as entertained me) with this post.
I assume that's a reference to the 2000 election. Some newspapers later did the count Gore requested and found he still would have lost... but a different method of recounting than he requested would have changed the result.
Notably, the different method of recounting was the one required by law.
Given he didn't ask for that one, I have little sympathy for his loss, but it would be accurate to say that he was illegally deprived of an election victory.
Someone always runs a betting pool for the US election (London's generally good for it, it wasn't legal stateside). They did specific states, as well, bet on whether Gore or GWB would win Florida, say.
We were reading Peanuts books when we were kids. Not all of them, but the one or two that were in the house, because we didn’t buy things then, and the few that were at the branch library.
Some parallels perhaps.
My husband believes you can’t get Dilbert unless you were sitting in a cubicle at a computer in 1995, which he was - but I read him parts of your essay and he liked it.
He’s curious if Jews all know about the Kabbalah and Gentiles just overlooked it all this time (I mean, until fairly recently). He wants to know what’s there. Maybe you’ve done an explainer on that.
Well, knowledge of the kabbalah (or a version of it) is part of the Western esoteric tradition. If you've ever seen the classic "circles on the floor for witchcraft/black magic" in horror movies, the writing around the circumference is derived from (often badly mangled) Hebrew words:
Used with pentacles, too (some of the examples in this article make me think of veves in voodoo, which makes me wonder about the derivation of that element in that tradition):
I used to collect Tarot decks back in the early 2010s so yeah, the classic deck chock-full of symbolism deliberately put in. Fun to play with, but I wouldn't take it seriously as genuine prediction (as a psychological tool, though, can be helpful for starting trains of thought).
Please tell your husband there are dozens of us here who disagree.
We read Dilbert when we were children, we *internalized it*, and then we sat in cubicles at computers in 2005 and 2010 and 2015 and found it was as true as we expected. "Holy crap, it was barely an exaggeration, and apparently it's barely changed in ten or twenty years".
Sadly, no, he’s weirdly immune to hyperventilating internet commentary, and the internet generally. Something wrong in his education or upbringing, I guess.
The vast majority of Jews do not know much about kabbalah. In this review, Scott Alexander claims a knowledge of kabbalah that would be extremely rare among Jews, and somewhat rare among knowledgeable Orthodox Jews (to restrict the comparison in two ways). It is hard to believe he has read any significant fraction of the source texts in which these ideas appear, although it is possible that he has read recent academic works which summarize them.
In modern (European) Spanish, "hacer cábalas" is a very commonly used and understood phrase meaning to speculate about future occurences, and also the word "cabal", meaning "exact" or "perfectly fitting." Both derived from "kabbalah".
There was a much loved bookstore called Stacey's Books near PacBell headquarters. I suspect Adams was referring to it when he named his restaurant. I'd gone to one of his book signings there, circa 2001, and he spent the entire time ranting about how white men were a despised, persecuted minority with no chances of career advancement, to a stony reception from the audience. So his rightward lurch long predates Trump.
According to the linked NYT article, the restaurant was founded by a business partner named Stacey. Adams merely took over the management of one location.
For a non-white person, this would be called "lived experience" - it's literally what happened to him, he was blocked in his career advancement because of DEI quotas (fortunately, this is also what made him into a full-time cartoonist instead of a middle-manager who occasionally draws slightly funny pictures). Many other people had the same experience, but their story was never heard of course, because they did not become minor celebrities.
I too greatly enjoyed Dilbert during my early/pre-teens. And I still do, the strips included in the article are hilarious. I also enjoyed the context this post gave me: I had a habit of reading dilbert.com daily and rarely if ever looked at the associated blog, but when Scott had successfully predicted the rise of Trump, that compelled me to investigate whether he actually had a predictive theory no one else had and initially his arguments even seemed rather convincing. Of course, it increasingly turned out that Trump was not in fact playing 5D Chess as Scott was claiming and instead Scott's claims were becoming increasingly unhinged, and so I started treating Dilbert the same way Dogbert does Tim in the comic, but this post offered some sort of closure and context to this chapter.: I now think he probably DID have a correct (PHB-shaped) theory, and since verifying the validity of rational arguments is "easy" (in P=?NP sort of sense), a lot of damage might have been avoided if people had started listening early, until Scott's ramblings became (likewise verifiably) unhinged.
It's unfortunate that he turned into fascism --- "But S--" "No! If there's twelve people sitting on a table and one is doing nazi salutes and shouting Hitler did nothing wrong at the top of his lungs and the other 11 don't kick the one guy out immediately, then there's 12 nazis sitting on a table" --- but while I haven't followed controversies, the reactions to Scott's passing to me seemed overblown. Was he a rampant sexist? Granted, it's been a decade since I last read Dilbert and of course I may not be woke enough to notice, but I don't recall getting such an impression from reading the comics? On that count I always preferred to give him the benefit of a doubt thinking of him as a nerd with typical nerdy shortcomings when it comes to avoiding any faux pas (the same goes for the characters of Dilbert and Wally insofar as they act inconsiderate), and his eventual turn to the dark side being for the usual kinds of reasons reasonably smart people can be disastrously wrong, rather than malice or deep personal failure. While I don't believe in giving any quarter to real enemies (like fascists) on the political battlefield, it's healthy to occasionally humanize them in personal life and see where they are coming from, and this post as well as Scott's farewell note paint him in a sympathetic light, and I'm grateful for being able to view him this way, thanks to the other Scott for making this possible. Perhaps I will even revisit some of the Dilbert comics (pre-2010 ones at least) rather than letting the taint of association prevent me from having a laugh.
What a great tribute. This essay will stand on its own as a perceptive essay about people like you and Scott Adams and your readership. I'm a little younger than you but one of the first comic collections I owned and read cover to cover repeatedly was Fugitive from the Cubicle Police. I didn't know he had one of those collections where he explained his thought processes behind the comics and his humor, but I devoured similar books by Gary Larson (The Far Side) and Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes).
I often found his claims about hypnosis and such a bit puzzling. I tried to keep an open mind, especially when he was so right about Trump (but not in every way, as you point out). I didn't know he had so many other predictions that were wacky and falsifiable and completely wrong, nor realize the extent to which it was a culmination of his life's work.
His story, your story, and my story (as one of your readers, a disappointed clever nerd, often too clever by half) have many commonalities. This essay blows my mind, really makes me think, and may change my life. But if I take it seriously, I fail.
"His fame turned the All-Seeing Eye of social media upon him, that gaze which no man may meet without consequence."
The same is true of genius. I've had the strange pleasure of meeting a few geniuses in my life, and even working with a few of them. One thing it taught me is the distinction between them and us "merely" smart people. Genius is consuming, a competitive fire that burns bright. And seeing them in their own light, it illuminated for me an unsettling truth; that the jump for those geniuses from "I'm nearly always right, when I and another disagree" and "I'm nearly always right, so someone disagreeing with me is *evidence* they're wrong" is short and easy to make. It's genuinely Greek Heroic Flaw stuff. Genius curdles into arrogance, if not tempered by strong friendships. And being that friend is a lot of work - emotional and otherwise - for those of us with the fleeting and bewildering privilege of being in their orbits.
I'm not calling S. Adams a genius. And I never met him, though like S. Alexander I also read his books with delight as a kid. But watching Adams's descent into madness definitely helped me understand and name this weird thing I had seen. Rest in peace.
I’ve never understood the problem with smart people believing they are (mostly) right on topics of interest to them. They have surely researched those points.
The trap there is that if you are really smart, often your specific subject comes so easily to you that you've never had to work at it. It's just instinctual knowledge that you look at X and immediately grok "Ah, then Y and Z follow!"
So you get used to "I don't have to do the deep digging those other guys have to do, because they are not as smart as me. I can immediately know if it's X or Y just by a cursory examination".
And that's how we get really smart, genuinely experts on their subjects, straying out of their lanes and making dumb pronouncements on other topics because "this is so easy, I don't have to study it" or even "This doesn't even merit study because it's so stupid on the face of it".
See Terry Eagleton's review of Dawkins' "The God Delusion" all the way from 2006, still an oldie but a goodie:
"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday."
He needs to know enough not to make the kind of elementary mistakes equivalent to "so if evolution says humans evolved from monkeys, why don't we have tails, huh?" or the ever-favourite "Evolution is only a *theory*, that means it's not real like a *law*".
Adams does a bit of that, too, in "God's Debris" - the kind of "hey, betcha never thought of *this* knock-down argument, huh, believers?" that most have encountered about sixty times over two thousand years. Gosh gee wow, no I nor nobody else never thought of the problem of evil, or divine omniscience versus free will, or why would an infinite being be subject to emotions?
"He continued. “Does it make sense to think of God as wanting anything? A God would have no emotions, no fears, no desires, no curiosity, no hunger. Those are human shortcomings, not something that would be found in an omnipotent God. What then would motivate God?”
Hint: yeah, that's why we say God is impassible, Scott.
Part of Dawkins' argument against the existence of God is that certain aspects traditionally associated with God, such as omnipotence or benevolence, are either inconsistent with each other or inconsistent with the observable world.
You don't need to understand theology to argue against the existence of God, but you might need to in order to fill up an entire 600-page book with arguments against the existence of God.
Domain expertise is what is needed to be right on a topic. Being smart makes domain expertise easier to get with the same amount of effort; interest is generally required to acquire domain expertise, since otherwise why spend the effort; but none of that matters if you decide not to spend your brain power on actually learning about the thing. (Which is not quite the same as "research" - all kinds of conspiracists can cite reams of extremely poor data for their conclusions.)
In "The Right Stuff" Wolf pointed out that a fairly serious problem at Edwards AFB was the tendency of highly trained experts in the art of flying experimental aircraft tended to believe they possessed similar expertise in every other possible mode of transportation, leading to a disproportionate number of highway accidents.
According to the book, Yeager broke the sound barrier with a broken arm, having recently fallen from a horse he was riding carelessly.
People like winning. "They told me I couldn't, but I did" is a stock inspirational line, but it's from the same kind of thinking. That competitive disagreement can be - and usually is - healthy, But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions.
One failure mode is if you stake too much on it and are wrong, that can be disastrous. We don't usually hear about them, because they lost and are embarrassed about it, except at r/wsb, but "lost his shirt on the stock market" is a tragically common story.
Another is if you play that competitive game, the poker kind of smart, sometimes you go on runs. If you're smart, that happens a lot. If you're a genius, it's not so much that sometimes you go on runs as occasionally you're *not* on a run. Do that too much and you might carelessly abstract away disagreement as proof that the counterparty is wrong. And most of the time, you'll be right! And have saved time and self-doubt! But you'll often be a jerk and occasionally you'll also be disastrously wrong. You might think that just because you're Andrew Carnegie and you're the titan of steel and oil, you can stop a war. You know, hypothetically! And he legitimately tried and it shattered him. Or you might be a guy who makes rockets and cars and try to make one little submarine. (Hypothetically!) And then you get rejected and it shatters you. You might be a funny and well-liked cartoon-makin' man, and then make a wild prediction and it seems suddenly very plausible. (Hypothetically!) But then all the people at the newspapers who used to look up to you turn against you, and it shatters you.
But in a sense the second case is a lot like the first case. Being called on an emotionally over-leveraged position is less immediately an off-ramp to the game as compared to a financially over-leveraged position, but it can get you nonetheless.
I was happy that I put up my Scott Adams post explaining how huge of an impact "Dilbert" had c. 1991 -- crazy as it sounds 35 years later, nobody had ever thought to do a funny cartoon about tech workers in cubicles before -- a week or two ago before he died.
Three wives, lead singer of a 1960s rock band, grew up in IBM headquarters town, English major in college during the 1960s, seven years working in corporate America, unbelieving son of a Protestant minister whom he greatly admired, mother died sadly, came to dominate writing humor for white collar corporate frequent fliers the way Adams dominated humor for techies.
I've found Adams an an important illustrative example on what not to do:
on how to not see the evils of the world and Sour-grapes your way into being a willing collaborator,
on how not to let your achievements in one field run away with you,
on how to not let your self image as a intellectual who stands apart from the masses hide the fact that your main reward circuit is activated by people clapping at you when you do your one trick (either do the trick knowingly, or achieve enlightenment)
on how not to isolate yourself to the point where compassion and empathy start feeling like frivolous weakness.
And on how just because you were bullied, pushed down, and taken advantage of for your talents and tendencies by (SYSTEM), capitalist realism in this case; that doesn't make your every impulse heroic.
It is interesting to see a guy who but for the grace of god/ A||B goes anybody with just a hint of the tism and a rightward direction on the curve.
Unbelievably good post that elevates and redefines the medium. Sometimes it feels like nothing online can mean anything, but this does.
I think the idea that the universe is the result of God killing himself also shows up in German Romanticism, in Philipp Mainländer, though maybe I'm misinterpreting it. Also, along the lines of "killshots," I'm pretty sure Scott coined the phrase 4d chess, right?
One of the great things about Scott Adams to me is his early and strong embrace of the internet as a place for social and intellectual life. I think his was the first blog I read, and I read it for years and years. Dilbert was my first email subscription and it outlasted by a decade almost everything else.
On Adams' particular flavor of reaction formation, a young, supple mind can balance both defense mechanisms of self-awareness and "I'm better than those nerds"-ness because, when you are in the early stages of your life, you can have awareness of your current flaws, but maintain hope that you will change and somehow prove you are actually better than those nerds at some point in the future. As you grow older and that future never materializes, you now have the evidence that you are not better than those nerds. You can either lean towards self-awareness and accept this reality, or you can lean towards the belief you are better than those nerds but The Universe conspired against you so now you don't have the proof. To form that narrative, you have to give up the self-awareness. Its not that young, supple minds are more capable of holding both of the contradicting defense mechanisms at once, its just that the inevitable crash to reality forces you to pick a side.
I'm very disappointed about the lack of kabbalistic analysis of the divine/enlightened garbage man who is a periodically-reoccuring minor character in Dilbert.
I think he kind of deserved it. I mean, the race stuff was whatever it was, and your opinions on that will be your opinions of every other race-based cancellation, but afterwards he became an extremely typical right-wing pundit who shared basically every flaw of online MAGAism. I choose to remember him for who he was before that happened, and for the parts of him which survived that transition.
That’s all true, but then it’s the cancellation that matters. As you said, that tactic sent people who might have been in the middle running towards whatever side granted a little psychological comfort.
It’s pretty clear who he was, and in any other time period, I doubt he would have been so political.
He definitely deserved it. It wasn't brought up in this essay, but his defense of Charlottesville is inexcusable. He tried to whitewash it and "hypnotize" people into not remembering that the President was trying to both sides a KKK march where Nazis murdered a nice liberal lady. You simply have to be 100% against those people. If you disagree, then we really don't have anything to talk about.
That’s what I thought too until I saw the actual transcript where Trump unprompted specifically says he’s NOT talking about the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who should be totally condemned.
See for yourself. The media typically cut off the second red box in video clips and quotes:
This is exactly my point. Scott Adams ignores the fact that this specific condemnation only came after two previous failed attempts and immense public pressure. Even then, the President immediately undermined his own statement by insisting that blame should be shared by those who were there opposing the white supremacists.
I find the suggestion that the media is somehow lying about Trump's true feelings about his white supremacist supporters ridiculous.
I spent a lot of time in 2015 reading Scott's blog and I found his observation (that people aren't rational, they just work backwards to rationalize their positions) insightful. I think maybe Scott hypnotized himself in this case.
No, Trump made this specific condemnation of the neo-Nazis at the exact same time he made the “both sides” remark. Click the link. It was an unprompted clarification that he was not including them as part of the fine people he was referring to moments earlier.
You can argue that there were people on the right who were not white supremacists or neo-Nazis who were still distasteful and Trump should have done more to distance himself from them. But the hoax is the claim Trump was referring to neo-Nazis as fine people when he actually said the opposite.
My point is that Scott Adams attempts to rewrite history by narrowly focusing on this one specific statement while ignoring the context. This was Trump's third attempt at addressing the events, while under extreme political pressure.
It’s fair to say that Trump was unwilling to criticize people who opposed removing Confederate statues. It’s fair to say that he thought some of them were fine people.
It’s not fair to say he thought neo-Nazis and white supremacists were fine people. There is a world of difference. It’s not rewriting history to call attention to the difference.
Even lumping together Charlottesville, Jan 6, and Minnesota is glossing over massive differences.
The fine people hoax was so notorious because most of the country (but perhaps not you) sees a world of difference between defending Confederate statue preservationists and defending neo-Nazis, and the media falsely claimed Trump was defending neo-Nazis.
The latter claim made people literally want to kill Trump.
I think there's also something to be said about the transition from engaging with your fans mostly via e-mail, which even with an address published in every strip requires friction to respond to, to the much lower barrier to entry Social networks we have now. There's a nice pre-2012 internet in the Dilbert Blog (and other stuff like Bill Simmons mailbag columns) which come from only getting feedback from your most thoughtful and engaged fans.
I mostly missed Dilbert as a comic - well aware of it, but never really sat down and read it. (More of a Calvin and Hobbes person, as my avatar suggests...)
And thankfully I mostly don't relate to Dilbert in my work life... but his "Code Mocking" strip is more or less a timeless truth of software engineering to me: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2013-02-24 .
(Also I think about the line "my purpose in life is to transport huge quantities of coffee from the coffee maker to a urinal" - I bet you can find that one on a boomer-style self deprecating coffee mug somewhere)
I stopped buying into "my higher-ups are fools" narrative after I played some multiplayer games with optional cooperation.
In 1v1 games or multiplayer strictly adversarial games, the most competent player wins. But in games like Diplomacy, being known as "competent and likely to win" is a surefire way to get other players to band together and kick you out first. In these situations, being competent is a losing strategy.
So when I see that that people at the top are incompetent, I feel warm inside. It means we're winning.
Being visibly competent is the problem. I have a friend who frequently says--and I'm sure this is common in the Navy and other places--"Your problem is that you showed up on time and demonstrated basic competence. Now everything is your problem and your fault".
It's like how good drug mules don't go speeding down the road at 40 over, but also don't conspicuously follow the letter of every traffic law.
I haven't played Diplomacy, but I think real-life business is less zero-sum than such games. "Likely to win" doesn't actually make you a target for everyone else to bring down.
Real life isn't a multi-player, single-winner game.
And my solo Diplomacy wins came from being recognized as a competent leader of an initially-defensive alliance. If the game didn't include the wholly unrealistic "to be a winner you must now betray all your remaining allies" step, I never would have done so. And even when I was planning to do so and everybody else at least half-suspected I was planning to do so, they needed a competent partner or leader to even survive.
I don't think this is it. In business it's pretty rare to need to defuse alliances - your competitors will always be competing against you. I don't think the fact that Sam Altman is known as a good businessman risks all the other AI companies allying against him in some sense.
In business, defusing alliances is a constant everyday occurrence - internally for middle managers (like Dilbert's boss). A good example is a strong performer like Steven Sinofsky being ousted out by peers at Microsoft, and his leadership stake getting partitioned among his detractors.
If you're a middle manager hunting for a promotion, so are 10 other middle managers on your level. One of the 10 is a star performer. What are your options?
1) Being an even star-er performer head and shoulders above your rival, so that upper management notices you and promotes you and not them.
2) Forming an anti-frontrunner coalition and use various collective tools to oust the star - peer evaluations saying "not a team player", HR reports, convenient process hiccups.
In many cases, option 2 is optimal. It's even more optimal if "coordination" is basically your only performance indicator - common in government work outside business (as I gather from watching Chinese palace dramas).
That being said, I do admit that in the American AI field, the most permissive industry in a highly deregulated nation, the anti-frontrunner dynamics might be less salient than in other contexts.
I haven't played Diplomacy specifically, but this is a thing in other free-for-all strategy games that I have played, like computer fantasy wargame Dominions. That being said, there are ways the player who is "known for being likely to win" can do, like self-handicapping by playing weak factions, meme strategies, focus on roleplay (self-handicapping RP restrictions aside, RP player is more predictable: if they're on an anti-undead crusade, as a non-undead faction you can be pretty sure they're not going to attack you... at least for as long as they continue their RP thing), or merely playing really conservatively rather than exploding out of the gates ("I understand that you all want to kill me for being the known expert player, but as your scouting has likely revealed, I had a really bad starting position giving me only 15 provinces, while this other guy is at immediate risk of snowballing to victory at 30 provinces, maybe we should be allies instead") and trying to stay in the running, and so long as they stay in the contention and other players keep dropping off contention, eventually there will be two players in the contention and then they can outplay and win. The best players don't necessarily or even often win (matches often have 10+ players so positive winrate would be rather special, especially when playing with closer peers), but their win rates are nevertheless much higher than average in spite of this emergent "autobalancing" mechanic.
To be clear I think the advice in this case was actually pretty good. The last “key check” is actually the “crux” of the debate, something Scott has written about.
Funny, I also read Dilbert and Dave Barry obsessively for those years and can’t make a joke to save my life. I can relate heavily to a nerd that sucked at talking to humans and then tried to use my IQ to become a master persuader. I was actually able to do this well enough to become a pointy-haired boss of HR of all fields. I was unaware of all of his books, and find myself curious on his ones on persuasion. I truly will miss him.
"He was one of the first people to point out the classic Trump overreach, where he’ll say something like “Sleepy Joe Biden let in twenty trillion illegal immigrants!” The liberal media would take the bait and say “FACT CHECK: False! - Joe Biden only let in five million illegal immigrants!”, and thousands of people who had never previously been exposed to any narrative-threatening information would think “Wait, Joe Biden let in five million illegal immigrants?!”"
This. So many times. People don't talk enough about how successful this is for him. Even when there's just an out of context grain of truth.
"Haitians in Ohio are eating our pets"
"Fact check: False"
"Here's a video with no other context of a black guy who said he ate dog meat once. THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS LYING TO YOU!"
I'd be lying if I said I never was surprised by what was actually going on after a Trump exaggeration. I'm happy for things like the immigration example to work for him - I think the actual number of people illegally living here genuinely surprised people, even if it was often not as many as he said.
What annoys me is the times where he makes a statement that is complete BS, and his supporters keep retreating until they finally find something that he clearly didn't originally mean and claim everyone else has TDS - like the Haitians eating dogs example.
Can you recite chapter and verse about the Haitians eating cats? (This is an actual cultural concept in Haiti, related to a holiday). And why that was a good thing to say?
Trump's persona is a lot smarter than people think.
I don't know much about Haiti, but I do know that despite weeks of trying, nobody ever turned up any evidence of any Haitian in that town eating a single cat, much less an epidemic of it. But yes, as I said his persona is very effective.
There's a reason Trump chose the Haitians. In the pecking order of Caribbean nations, they're at the bottom. Other Caribbean peoples look down on them, feel they are inferior.
It's not the only reason to say "Haitians are eating cats and dogs" but it is an astute reason.
In that case of Ohio, Trump/Vance were able to manipulate the media to widely broadcast the message that heartland Ohio towns were now inhabited by large Haitian populations. That core message of "alien invasion!" is enough to terrify white heartland voters across the country. It doesn't matter a whit if the Haitians in reality are law abiding, hard working and good neighbors, my white rural New Hampshire neighbors don't want them moving in. By getting the media and liberals to push back on the "eating cats and dogs" slander, Vance actually manipulated minds just as Adams would have suggested.
Yes exactly. Now that I know to look for it, I can usually avoid playing into it when talking to my republican family members, but just have to shake my head as the MSM steps on the rake over and over.
Pat Buchanan used to have those kind of sessions with Richard Nixon while writing speeches for Nixon in 1966: Pat would write, "And an audit of the XYZ program found that 82% of your taxpayer dollars were wasted!" But Nixon would read it as "And an audit found that 91% of your taxpayer dollars were wasted."
Buchanan asked Nixon why he was always misread stats like that. He said because that way the local newspaper would cover his speech on two different days: tomorrow they'd quote me saying 91% wasted and then the next day they'd issue a correction saying only 82% of your taxpayer dollars were wasted. So twice as many people will learn that the XYZ program is a big waste of their money.
That's really interesting. Well fair enough I guess. It's the media's job to correct it, but democrats have to be smarter about balancing correcting lies and increasing salience.
My daughter brought home a children's novel the other day that had "Dave Barry" listed as an author. I thought "well that's probably a common name, couldn't possibly be the same guy". It was!
I learned of you through Scott. Think a lot of what you say is valid but have to admit I’m one of the people whose lives he changed for the better. When I first listened I was a 25 year old 3x college dropout and 10 years later I have a great career and family. A lot of that comes from applying his advice. Subjectively I’ll always love him because of what he gave me, without even knowing who I am.
Mostly the reframes and micro lessons. Almost everyday at work or home there’s a situation where one pops into my head.
“I’m not anxious, I’m excited”
“laziness is caused by thinking about the cost instead of the pay off”
“systems are better than goals”
The main idea, that by changing my thoughts I can change my reality, is simple but went a long way for me. It opened up my imagination to what’s possible and made my thinking more positive.
Very tangential to the topic, but reacting to the idea that you can help people by teaching them the social manipulation skills that actually make people successful: The problem with this is that it's an arms race, and once those skills become common they no longer produce success. They just make the world worse, forever.
Perhaps for some but other techniques work because they take advantage of how humans are wired, so they simply represent better, more memorable communication.
For example, the persuasion power of an abstract concept like “border security” is less than that of a concrete visualization like “building a wall”.
Right, but what I'm saying is that if everyone trying to persuade you to different sides of an argument is using non-persuasive language, there is room for you to consider the actual merits instead.
Whereas if (ad absurdum) everyone on every side is using super-advanced brain-hacking mind-control language or w/e, then your decision is mostly determined by who you listen to first, not any particular merit of any particular decision.
Persuasion is inherently a bias introduced on top of a decision process. You can be in favor of persuasion towards what you consider good things, but once that technique becomes universal and the other side has it, it no longer produces more good things. It's just a stochastic force pushing decisions that is unrelated to the quality of different choices.
Scott Adams talked about this specifically and dubbed it "the Documentary Effect". He observed that just about every documentary will be persuasive because it shows the arguments for one side in such a more powerful way than the other, and thus you can't believe any documentary until you've also seen one arguing the opposite.
In general, I'd prefer to see both sides of an argument make the most persuasive case they can and I view that as a positive end state rather than an arms race to the bottom.
I didn't read Dilbert as a kid because I was 22 when it started.
I followed Adams' blog for a time during the Stacey's thing. He had a fair amount of the crazy even then, and eventually I found the value overwhelmed by highly confident nonsensical assertions.
He would say things untethered to reality, like, "I could never be on a jury because all prosecutors understand hypnotism and they would not let a hypnotist on a jury." (this is from memory, may not be an exact quote.) This not a particularly long sentence to be wrong in a lot of ways.
Aside: I think the Dilbert TV series was good-ish.
The show was ok, but I don’t know, animating it didn’t really add anything to the strips. It did however give us the clip about “the knack”, which I share pretty frequently.
Maybe a looser live action adaptation would have played well at the peak of The Office / Parks and Rec?
The trick Adams' built the last years of his life around is a mental privilege escalation exploit of the form "I can take over your brain. You find that statement ridiculous and annoying, so now you're thinking about me - I win! Oh no, was that statement even more obnoxious? Because now there's A Controversy, and that means..."
This trick is only as effective as we collectively allow it to be, and can in theory be easily defeated by simply ignoring the speaker. To this end, and to discourage the proliferation of low-level memetic vandalism, I have nothing else to say on the subject of Scott Adams.
This is a great post. I never really followed him beyond stumbling across the odd Dilbert strip years ago, then listening to him steelman Trump on Sam Harris's podcast in ~2016 (and thinking the clown genius stuff was pretty damn insightful for the time), then finally being vaguely aware of the recent controversy. But now I'm going to acquire those original books and make some time to read a bunch of Dilbert.
I think I read all of the annotated Dilbert books I could get my hands on during elementary school (my family was poor so I could only read what I could find in libraries). This is probably a formative element in my humor.
The other formative element was that I tried reading all the lists of jokes I could find online and ~memorizing them. Obviously it didn't do much for things like timing, delivery, etc, but I learned a lot about the structure of jokes, and attuned my own sense of which jokes are clever/original/funny by loading all of it into my training data.
Dilbert was real and the reason his red tie is flapping in the breeze is revealed in this photo of the recovery of the NASA Gemini XII crew, Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin.
Several years ago, I started reading his strip every day, and read How to fail at almost everything and still win big, which I loved.
I found him so insightful, that when he started to show great admiration and support for Trump, I became very confused.
For several months, I had a shred of hope that maybe, given his interest in the art of persuasion, it was all a very ambitious social experiment of persuasion - he would show how he could persuade thousands of people that Trump, one of the most erratic and unlikable political candidates ever, was actually a genius.
And after the elections, he would go "ah! see, I persuaded thousands of people to genuinely hold the position that Trump is competent and a genius, so there you go, techniques of persuasion can be incredibly powerful."
Well, that didn't happen and he would only increase repetitive (and unpersuasive) Trump related output.
Sadly, I just stopped following him.
Much like you, I kept thinking of him in a somewhat bittersweet way.
The man sure was funny and had some great ideas. RIP 🙏
Ken White is still worth listening to on the Serious Trouble podcast with Josh Barro, I just choose to believe his Twitter/Bluesky is run by a different person (or partition of his brain)
There's a special kind of sadness watching your heroes stumble and I've felt it a lot lately. "How do I keep the current epistemic environment from driving me crazy?" is one of the great problems of our time.
Don't get me wrong, he was vaguely funny in the 90s. But, even just among cartoonists who were recently alive, compare him to someone world-class, like Quino, say.
I suspect it had a lot to do with him going crazy, too. He was probably radicalized when it first happened, but kept quiet for fear of the consequences. After the cancellation, he had nothing left to lose.
For someone who was so in tune with office culture most of the time, I'm suprised Adams didn't see this for what it was.
In his books, he brags about how he was bad at his job, and got promoted because people liked him and he was funny. In the same book he then talks about how he stopped getting promoted due to the diversity ceiling.
Anyone in office culture knows that a manager will give you any reason to soften the blow of being passed over. Adams admits he was bad at the job. Managers probably just didn't want to tell him he wasn't qualified since they like him. Much easier to blame it on something else.
It's hard to know where reality lies. And "actually, race and gender discrimination was the socially acceptable excuse" could also be kind of radicalizing.
Either way, it became an important part of the story he told about himself & I didn't think the eulogy would be complete without it.
I don't deny this happened or is a real issue in society, just that Adams' case is likely an example of the handicap parking spot fallacy.
Adams also had that special kind of narcissism that allowed the gymnastics to claim both that he got promoted despite being bad at his job, but when he wasn't promoted, it was for a different reason.
This. Even if Scott Adams was actually passed over for promotion because of his bad performance, the fact that his bosses told him he was passed over for his race and gender means discriminating against white males in the workplace is completely acceptable. Why shouldn't that be radicalizing? Why should white men just accept such bigotry lying down?
Bingo. I remember during Biden I was removed from a hiring panel after HR noticed "there were too many white men on it". They didn't even pretend I wasn't being removed simply because of my race and gender. And I remember when I filed an EEO complaint the answer came back "just you, not all white men, hence legal".
I'm not in favor of affirmative action, but "white guy who is bad at his job keeps getting promoted despite incompetence because white guy managers like him and find him funny" is not a great argument against it.
I wonder if his earlier promotions were radicalizing to anyone else?
If he really got promoted because he was funny, and his boss sees no problem with openly declaring bias against white men, why wouldn't a black guy who's funny have been promoted? If someone wants to start a anti-promoting-funny-but-incompetent-people crusade, count me in.
I don't think this is a case of projecting racism when in reality, they just don't like you personally which I agree is 99% of workforce EEO complaints. From the OP, they stated his boss explicitly told him it was because of his race and gender, the same as my boss. In a modern litigation aware environment, no boss would be that overt unless it was acceptable and true rather than just saying "sorry, you didn't get the gig, the faceless panel thought Laquanda was a better fit. Next time maybe".
>I don't think this is a case of projecting racism
So it seems we have 2 separate points.
(1) Adams was passed over for performance reasons, but told it was due to affirmative action (this is not saying affirmative action is good or bad, only claiming that it was used as an excuse to avoid a harder conversation with an employee)
(2) Adams was the best person for the job, and was only passed over due to affirmative action.
The OP was claiming (1), that (1) is still radicalizing, (even if you accept the handicap parking spot fallacy is indeed a fallacy, it still causes real emotions and perceptions among people). So in response to OP, I think my response holds.
Your claim I think is different, claim (2)? I find that hard to believe given the self admission of how bad he was and how little he worked. If he had been working his tail off and doing great, I might believe it, but he was not. As for the office politics, in my anecdotal experience, it is much easier for managers to make up reasons they think will keep people happy.
> Adams and Elon Musk occasionally talked about each other - usually to defend one another against media criticism of their respective racist rants
I claim this is a false accusation. Can you provide one example of such a racist rant. And I don't count some out of context quote from some worthless progressive journalist who called it racist. You of all people should know not to believe a word of that garbage.
The main one that Adams got cancelled for was him saying things like "white people should get the fuck away from black people . . . just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, get away".
He was responding to a poll that suggested that ~50% of black people didn't agree with the statement "It's OK to be white" and his advice was based on the idea that you simply shouldn't associate with people who don't accept you, and not on any deeper notions of racial superiority/inferiority. If he was racist, given he podcasted maybe half a year worth of discussion, there would be much more than that singular statement. And in that statement, if the races were reversed, he would have given the same advice, given my understanding of his position. Finally, it was his normal brand of hyperbole echoed in other less-controversial topics, and occurred around the time I estimate he learned he had serious/probably terminal cancer.
"Rant" is a pretty loaded term here. "Evidence-based assertion" would be closer to neutral. "Irrefutable advice" would be loaded in the opposite direction.
You obfuscate in an attempt to dodge the point by claiming my argument is that "it never happened." If by "it" you mean the thing that all the worthless journalists called a racist rant, then clearly it did happen. If by "it" you mean a racist rant, then yes, it never happened because it was not racist and also not a rant.
Did you ever see the whole thing? Because that's just the same sentence all the journalists pulled out, so not sure if you came to the same conclusion as them after seeing the whole thing or just read that somewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSMhg6udxn4
I dispute that this is racist, and I also dispute that it is a rant.
Can you say what you think racism is? To me it is very obvious that that video is a display of racism, since he is advocating for prejudice against an entire group based on skin colour.
I think you have a fine leg to stand on about the word "rant" since he delivers it fairly calmly and coherently. It's not really the important part though.
Do you believe racism is a real concept or not? Because if you do, then saying "stay the fuck away" from a singular race is textbook racism, and if it's not then nothing is.
If you ignore the fact that he was saying "stay the fuck" away because of how racist they are against you, then yes. But you don't want to address the obvious racism in that poll he cited and instead want to take 3 words he said completely out of context because that context is devastating to your point.
Great obituary, and no doubt far better than anything we will read about Scott Adams in the MSM.
I had no idea of Scott's serious philosophical wrangling, and always rather assumed that his supposedly self help books were merely vehicles for his unfailingly funny and wry cartoons.
I also thought I had a fairly complete collection of his books, bought over quite a few years from the 1980s, but now it's clear there must be many later ones I've never seen.
Dear Scott, I have read SSC and ACX for many years, and I wonder whether this was your first post that was not kind.
I understand that this is a very exceptional post because Scott Adams was special to you. But there has always been one trait of you that has inspired true awe in me, and that is your endless kindness. Please don't make it a habit to let that slip.
I am not sure why you think the post was unkind. It was thoughtful and thorough far beyond the norm. In fact, it was the kind of tribute which only a thoughtful writer can pay to another, involving the entire histories of both, in cultural context. It was loving, in the best sense.
Hm, I did notice that other commenters here also did not find it unkind.
Perhaps I am missing the cultural context. I knew Scott Adams for his comics and nothing more. Until yesterday I did not know that he was involved in any culture wars or politics, or got cancelled, or wrote anything else than comics. I guess that US readers will know this context, and this apparently changes things.
From my outside view, I still find it hard to read the post as anything else than unkind, except the last section, which is more conciliatory. Scott Alexander does not conceal that he finds Scott Adams' books plainly dumb, that he thinks Scott Adams has gone totally off rail, even become delusional, and that he is essentially a failed existence. This is a very harsh verdict about a person. Even if true, it is certainly not kind. Probably this has all been the common verdict of the readership even before the post, but for me this is a pretty shocking damnation of the life of a person. And the language "racist rants", "These paragraphs cured me of my misgivings", "cringiest way possible", "second-worst introduction" doesn't do anything to soften the blow.
But I accept that I probably perceive the article very differently from how it was supposed to, because I lack shared background.
It’s true and necessary. To ignore his controversial turn into politics would be Pollyannish, to ignore that his books were increasingly crankish would be hagiography.
And given the tone of other obits of the man, this one is extremely kind, relatively speaking!
Something shared by 50% of the population is definitionally controversial. And the fact that he was dropped by many papers for being controversial is, well, a fact, regardless of my personal feelings on the fairness of the matter.
My opinion of his non-comics writing as “crankish” is nonpartisan - I felt that way well before his 2016 MAGA turn.
I didn't find it necessary. If anything, I would expect a community such as this to have a bit more epistemic humility toward a radical free-thinker. Certainly moreso than to describe his writings as "crankish".
I mean he has a whole thing on “affirmations” that is basically “The Secret: For Men”. Then the “master persuader” stuff. It all has this dynamic that extends from the “thought experiments” Alexander described well, this sort of “I’m not saying this is literally magic obviously that’s silly (but it’s magic)”.
It’s absolutely pseudoscience (at the very least in the sense that he didn’t generally arrive at these conclusions scientifically) and it’s absolutely “crankish” in the sense that the man was extremely dedicated to developing and promulgating some eccentric pseudoscientific/pseudoreligious theories. “Crank” is the most cromulent English word for the career of the non-cartoonist Scott Adams. I think it would go a bit beyond “epistemic humility” to allow the possibility that Adams really had it all figured out and was basically correct in all or most of what he wrote.
And I say that with a fair degree of affection for the man for many of the same reasons Scott lays out in this piece.
> I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school.
First of all, I personally can attest that at least one other elementary-school kid voraciously read those books of syndicated Dilbert strips clearly written and illustrated for not our age-group. And funnily enough (I regret how I failed to learn the art of humor from them), Dave Barry's books also impacted significantly my childhood intellectual development; while Barry brought a dim awareness of the demands of adult life to child-me, the Dilbert comic books came to presage for me the drama to be found in office work. That the role specifically of an engineer demanded not only deep understanding of complex technologies, but also skill in navigating absurd corporate hierarchies and the mundane esoterica of business decision-making systems. Adult me might not have sought work as an engineer if not for Adam's comic visions of the brilliant yet detached technologist who manages to make a life out of navigating the intimidating halls of the office building so often shown in the third-panel establishing shot.
But what I can't stop thinking about is Adams' dead-man-switch final tweet, assuring everyone he had accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior on the basis of Pascal's Wager. He didn't consider his books or his art adequate as a legacy; he needed to be identified as a Christian. And I think about this risk calculus in the context of his glorification of corporate life.
The value prop of the office job is that it holds less risk than starting one's own company or than determining to achieve success as a creative. Corporate work is the safe path. So too, is the deathbed conversion to Christianity. Are the claims of Christianity-- that Jesus is the only way (and so on)-- ontologically true? In the knowledge-vacuum of normal life, what's the safe bet? It reminds me of this Sam Altman quote that most people are really bad at measuring risk and move far too conservatively and should take more risks in life.
If you're about to die, isn't it kind of a ballsy move to say: "I did what I did, I lived the life that I lived. Oh well, it is what it is."?
What if you die, and everything's actually fine. Just about everyone essentially gets to "move on," regardless of which religious beliefs they espoused or didn't. Assuming you can know anything after death, that'd be a really interesting secret to know about, right? But you can't really have 100% confidence that that's the case unless you *didn't* make the deathbed confession. A real risky move, might be. But, if you convert to Christianity while dying, you might "move on" always thinking, gosh that deathbed conversion must have been a really good call on my part because now I get this nice afterlife. Was it the conversion? There wouldn't be a solid way to know for sure without some level of spiritual risk.
So in some way, Scott Adams' died the way he lived: promoting an aversion to risk.
This is a strange comment, perhaps, but I am struck, reading your post, by some peculiarities in your style, peculiarities I thought were my own. In the first sentence of not-being-quoted text, for example, the placement of "voraciously read" and the placement and construction of the final bit, "clearly written and illustrated for not our age-group," both leap out to me, not just as things I may have written, but as symptomatic of a style I am increasingly trying, as I mature, to lose. Later on, the sentence which beings "That the role..." and which contains "not only," also strikes. I can keep providing examples, but I worry so to do would risk obscuring my point, which is that your writing strikes me syntactically as more similar to my own than most writing I in the wild encounter. I have several questions for you, any replies to which I ask you either offer in this thread or send to my email [wertionworld [at] gmail [dot] com], because I have blocked, for anti-distraction purposes, most substack domains, and so am unable either my substack Messages or your Captive Liberty to view.
Questions:
1. By whom has your prose style most, in your estimation, been influenced?
2. How does this style, for you, feel to write?
3. How did you arrive at this prose style?
4. Do you feel you are able, when you want, to turn this style off? If so, how do you do this?
Hi Cauliflower, I'm not answering every question because some of what you asked is already answered on my blog. Stylistic influence comes from those whom you spend time reading, and especially reading closely. If you unblock my domain `captiveliberty.substack.com`, you'll see who those writers are for me.
Probably the biggest choice in writing is whether to spend more time or less time editing and improving one's prose before hitting "send". Another choice comes from which writers to read and (therefore) to emulate. As human beings, we learn to communicate through imitation, and that includes writing. The more we read, and the more diverse the source works we read, the more choices appear to us.
There was a meme a while ago about the "Former Gifted Kid" - something like "We never stopped to ask who the gift was from. Turns out, it was the fae." It explains a lot about the world.
The text adventure author was actually Scott Adams, not Alexander. (And yes, it was a different Scott Adams, not the guy who's the subject of this post)
Ha! That's funny, I totally just thought that you were making a joke.
Incidentally, Scott Adams the game designer is a pretty interesting guy in his own right. He was pretty influential in making games that average people could actually play on the early, cheaper computer models, at the time when the better computers cost as much as a car and they were very difficult to use. I wonder how many people learned about computers and programming by starting off with his games? He's also very much alive and still making games, so I wonder if he sometimes gets annoyed that people are perpetually confusing him with "that other Scott Adams."
> In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer.
I don't believe that trying ivermectin to treat terminal cancer says anything about whether he was a true believer. He tried it (among other things), said it didn't work, and moved on. In the same situation, I'd be more than willing to try low-risk options like ivermectin or even acupuncture, à la Steve Jobs. He was simply hedging his bets, much like he did with his deathbed conversion.
That's exactly my thoughts. People who write that Scott naively believed that ivermectin can treat cancer, probably just show their negative bias. They quote statistics that prostate cancer survival is 100% (5 year) but omit the fact that Scott was diagnosed with stage 4 which has only 50% chance and his cancer has spread to the bones that is even worse.
More interesting would be to ask why he got diagnosed so late? He was unlikely avoiding doctors or not caring about his health. I can only speculate but maybe it was because during covid pandemic access to non-emergency healthcare was limited.
At least in the UK people have higher mortality now than before pandemic, not related to covid. Reasons are not entirely clear but missed diagnoses during covid time are often mentioned as one of the reasons. Sadly, no politician wanted to hear about this when making decisions about lockdowns (except in Sweden).
There's been more than one study out showing that the covid19 vaccines have a correlation with increases in cancer severity. I didn't look up the last one, because it was being DDOSed at the time. (The prior one was a population study in South Korea).
From what I heard, he didn't try ivermectin until his regular doctors told him his case was hopeless, at which point he was willing to try unconventional things with small probabilities of success.
I agree with what you are saying and I am replying because I find it shameful that such comments are made about ivermectin being tried (solely) as insane without any one of us knowing what he also tried prior to becoming hopeless. I will reverse course on this if anyone actually knows his treatment plan end to end. Thankfully, most people who are withering away with no clear good options left don't care about being called stupid by internet.
Actually we don't know much with sufficient certainty about Steve Jobs medical case, what were his initial prognosis, what treatments he took and in what order.
Widely known ≠ what actually happened.
Person's health is highly sensitive topic and most people avoid disclosing full medical history in public. Terminal cancer patients try alternative treatments in conjunction with regular therapies quite often.
“Isaacson’s Account: Isaacson wrote that by the time of the 2004 surgery, the cancer "had spread to the tissues surrounding the pancreas." He noted that Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell, and his doctors had pleaded with him to have the surgery earlier, fearing exactly this outcome”
There are roughly infinity low-risk options for treating cancer. In particular, a quick google suggests that there are at least 20.000 FDA-approved drugs on the market, so if your standard is "It's got to be a *real medicine* even if it's not approved for *this*", then 99.995% chance you're going to pick a drug that's not ivermectin.
Unless you're a true believer, MAGA subtribe, in which case it's going to be ivermectin.
Ivermectin is not a drug approved by the FDA to treat metastatic prostate cancer.
The only reason anyone would take a drug like Ivermectin to treat metastatic prostate cancer is if they thought taking a drug approved for a completely different purpose might coincidentally treat metastatic prostate cancer. This isn't completely silly; one of the things actual medical researchers frequently do is test lots of other drugs to see if they might work - if they do, then they've already been tested for safety, we know what the side effects are, and there's production infrastructure in place. Ideally, they don't make the selection *completely* at random, and they start with tissue cultures or animal models, but with something like e.g. COVID, there's a whole lot of "we're in a desperate hurry, let's throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks". And Scott Adams was in a desperate hurry.
But he wasn't going to take 20,000 different drugs just to see what happened. The only reason anyone would take Ivermectin *specifically* to treat prostate cancer, is either they guessed randomly that that one drug out of twenty thousand would do the trick, or someone they trusted told them "this is the one drug that will do the trick".
And pretty much the only place anyone was being told "Ivermectin is the one drug that will do the trick", for anything but worm infestation, is in the right-wing alternate-media bubble.
I mean, I'm not part of the MAGA subtribe, but if I had terminal cancer and all the doctors say my case is hopeless, I'd try ivermectin too. Will it work? Almost certainly not, but what do I have to lose? Maybe the MAGA subtribe is right! Who knows, maybe it'll get rid of the worm infestation I didn't know I had and decrease my suffering by 1%.
Just because he tried something recommended by the MAGA subtribe in a desperate Hail Mary attempt to not die, doesn't mean he was a true believer.
2024, mind you, so a doctor on the "bleeding edge" might have a reason to prescribe it. Ivermectin is amazingly safe compared to most anti-cancer drugs.
Back in 2000 I was in charge of a startup's small marketing team. One of my employees had met a friend of Scott Adam's at a party. My employee told me that Scott is looking for a startup that would be OK hiring him so he could write with more insight about the startup world. (This was after he had left PacBell and was hanging around at home.) My immediate first reaction was, "Hey, that would be cool." About 15 seconds later I realized I would become literally the PHB. I declined enthusiastically.
As a chronic sufferer of TDS I've fallen into the "the friend of my enemy is my enemy," and long stopped having any respect for this other Scott A. The post did a great job of contextualizing a complicated and intelligent man's life and ideas.
That was meant to be somewhat toungue in cheek. I am vehemently opposed to many of his policies (especially the antidemocratic tendencies and his war on a clean energy transition), but don't really consider anyone an enemy. Everyone has a limited perspective highly influenced by their social context, including myself.
If you're wondering about the deleted comment, it was basically someone shaming me for admitting to TDS :) I really feel that there are people who fail to see they're in a cult on either side. I think there are some like that on the left, but when someone I expect to be rational like Adams is unable to see the huge flaws in someone like Trump, I tend to leap to the conclusion that they're not as rational as I had thought. I'm really glad our Scott took the time to bring out the nuance in Adams' thinking over time.
>God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit they’re nothing special.
This may or may not hit uncomfortably close to home.
I find that the quotes of his books are not nearly as bad as you seem to think they are. Maybe this means you'd find me close to an 19-year-old in philosophical depth, but I suspect the majority of the population is relatively shallow philosophically, regardless of age, which would make the "19-year-old" label inaccurate.
I found Scott Adams objectionable due to his resentment for other humans, not because of his low-quality philosophy and hypnotism.
For instance, even on Jan 9, a few days before he died, he comments "Interesting" on a tweet about how many people are just like LLMs, without a world model, and therefore we should take the vote away from them. (https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/2009804196359663713) He held these sorts of beliefs to the end.
His final statement emphasizes to "be useful", and I believe he felt many people to be useless, and feared being useless himself. Perhaps the best lesson one might take from his life is to avoid this trap. He hated that he wasn't as useful as he felt he could have been, and blamed the world for it. If he stopped putting so much value on being "useful", he likely would have lived far more happily.
He did write that he had an "amazing life", and you can believe he felt genuinely happy. But resentment flowed thickly throughout his social media, and I don't believe this is the product of contentment.
Love this, as I also have many crazy favorites (myself among them). But the mediocrity thing is one I can’t help but correct and as it relates to Adams actual thinking I think it’s worth raising.
Yes you will find someone who is better than you at every single possible thing you do if you get down to the specifics. Mostly anyway. But nobody will have your specific stack or motivations, which is another way of saying nobody will be better at being you. And you’ve got to make the best of what you’ve got.
It’s not that none of us are special, it’s that all of us are and that’s not untrue just because the inverse happens to be depressing and the straightforward version is on Sesame Street and repeated to children.
I loved this essay. It felt like something out of 'Speaker for the dead', an Eulogy that did not shy away from a persons very real flaws, but still written by someone who took the time to actually understand someone and had a real affection for them.
I too read a LOT of Dilbert when I was a kid too. I was many years out from actually experiencing a cubicle back then. But something about Dilbert, a smart, nerdy adult living in a world he didn't fully understand and didn't understand him, spoke to me as a smart nerdy kid in school.
I didn't read much of his later work and also felt he went down kind of a dark path later in life. His comics brought me a lot of happiness early on.
>> Even the word “sidhe” is tabooed and replaced with the euphemism “the fair folk” (from which we get modern “fairy”).
(Quoted from the Shaver article)
You should be aware that this is false. Modern "fairy" is derived from the word "fey" by the same suffix that gets us "wizardry" from "wizard". It referred to the realm where the fey lived, and in the modern day it has shifted in meaning to refer to the fey themselves.
The fair folk are so named in Celtic, using an adjective that means "attractive; pleasing to the eye". This was translated into English as "fair", a word that is etymologically unrelated to "fey". "Fey" is a loan from French; "fair" came from Old English (and proto-Germanic before that).
But it is true that there is a taboo (though that's a bit strong way to phrase it) about referring to them directly as "Fairies". Better to say "the Good People" or the like, in case they are listening, because they are very touchy and quick to take offence, and if they feel insulted, it will not go well for you.
The modern urban fantasy/romantasy novel thing about referring to the Fae always struck me as a little precious, though understandable; in a cultural context where "fairies" means Tinkerbell or the likes, it doesn't really get across the point you want to make, and Tolkien has so influenced "Elves" that nobody can copy him (except badly). A bit like turning "fairy" into "faery" so you can show how Our Elves Are Different; no, I'm not writing fairy stories, I am a Troo Pagan who venerates the faeries!
It's also very funny/somewhat alarming when you come out of a cultural context where "fairies" does *not* mean Tinkerbell or the likes to see the advertising of "Fairy Doors" so you want to invite in the fairies to your garden and home. Though even now that also is penetrating into the Irish market (alas? I'm not quite sure how to feel about yet one more tradition getting corrupted by the updated modern commercial Anglicised or at least Americanised version).
Basically there is no longer a way to speak authentically about this people. No matter what you do, it will always come with heavy baggage, much like how there is no way for anyone at all to authentically hear the Beatles for the first time with no preconceived notions.
... Seems like a fitting situation if it happened on purpose.
> Basically there is no longer a way to speak authentically about this people. No matter what you do, it will always come with heavy baggage
I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. There is no way to speak authentically about the people because they don't exist. To speak authentically about them, you'd have to believe they were real.
I think his cartoon was much more successful than any of his food-related endeavors. And Herbert Hoover, rising all the way up to POTUS, was far more successful than the overwhelming majority of politicians. If the Bank of France hadn't triggered the Great Depression, who knows how his political career could have turned out.
Herbert Hoover was also one of the greatest humanitarians of all time, apart from being successful at business and becoming president. His ARA food aid during the Soviet famine saved about 4 million lives at a cost of $250 each.
Ah I didn’t click through to the link. I honestly think he was a good enough humanitarian to include alongside or even in place of businessman in the main post, but either way I hope folks that see this comment will learn that hoover was an all time effective altruist. The paper that I link to is more recent than what Scott linked to.
Drew Carey + Dave Barry = some humor flesh golem?
That was the exact merging I was imagining
It's Drew Carey, though
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph9I-qPQ6FU
Thanks, I rushed this one to get it out while Adams' death was still in the news cycle, and obviously made a lot of mistakes.
This whole essay is a welcome relief from the spate of “good riddance” posts I’ve mostly seen, either with a political slant or (less caustic, these) in comics-adjacent spaces where Adams has long been sneered at because of his mediocre art.
I think an important moment for the evolution of Dilbert (or Adams) is the 2008 financial crisis. I remember reading the Dilbert book that collected the strips from that era and thinking how different in tone they were from previous collections—literally apocalyptic. “And thus ended capitalism,” the narrator/caption intones in one strip. “Maybe you should worry that the only viable livelihood of the future involves cannibalism,” the PHB boss tells Dilbert in another. I copied these quotes down, they seemed such a level-jump from the strip’s previous despairing laments about inefficiency.
I like to think Scott would have wanted it that way.
I really enjoyed this post. I think it's one of your better ones.
A little less than a Drew Barrymore.
Relevant to the topic of this piece, Drew Carey is a really good example of a super smart nerd who realized his limitations and played within them. His celebrity appearance on “who wants to be a millionaire” is a master class in character study. It’s in his autobiography somewhat, but also in the radio show he hosted for years, he saw what he could and couldn’t accomplish and took his money and time to just share with us the things he liked.
Drew Carey's TV sitcom was a smash its first few years so he signed a huge contract extension with (I believe) ABC, one that turned out reminiscent of Milton Berle's notorious 30 year million dollar per year contract in 1951 with NBC. Just as the public got tired of Uncle Miltie, the public got tired of Drew's show and he couldn't figure out how to boost his ratings.
To his credit, to earn his exorbitant pay Carey voluntarily took on a lot of additional work for ABC, such as emceeing its big annual meeting in which it gets affiliates to sign up again for next season by promoting upcoming programs.
That's really interesting. I respected him because he's someone who decided he wanted to be a comedian and then just worked super hard at it and made it happen. He seemed like a cool, unpretentious guy.
I just need to note you're not the only one who read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. I'm the other one.
I thought Dilbert, The Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes were mandatory by 3rd grade?
I think the first two were mandatory, but what filled in the third slot was a little more flexible. For whatever reason it ended up being Garfield for me (but also a South African political satire called Madam and Eve, and later Bloom County).
I'll add my name to the list of weirdly young people who were often seen reading business books that had cartoons in them.
I think his writing on Affirmations in The Dilbert Future was probably the seed he planted that later led me into the Rationality community. If Adams had been born later, he would have been a LW poster. In many ways I think he nailed down some of the core ideas around motivation and goal-setting.
The one Dilbert book I read was The Dilbert Principle, but I also enjoyed that as a kid, along with Dilbert comics before I ever worked in a cubicle.
Interesting. I adored Calvin and Hobbes as a kid but the only other comic I liked was Peanuts. I did not like Dilbert or The Far Side.
Even now, C&H is my jam. It brings me back to the joy of life, being young-at-heart. Dilbert only seems to revel in the misery of adulthood.
Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side were both essential for me as a kid, I devoured the collections and turned to the comics page for their sake only. Interesting to me that there is such a deep love for Dilbert - at the time I viewed it as belonging to the same category as Garfield, Nancy (is that what it was called?), etc. of corny and unfunny strips that I would nevertheless grudgingly read when I had too recently read the entire Calvin and Hobbes catalogue to pick a place to start again...
C&H was fantastic, but I did like The Far Side as well. Dilbert was always a little too implicitly bitter for me.
It's a shame that Adams tried to treat with cancer with Ivermectin, but I do think his shift to the MAGA side of the political spectrum was part of a necessary cultural process.
I mean, he was dying anyway. Who cares how he chooses to go out.
>Nancy (is that what it was called?)<
I thought you were thinking of Cathy, but apparently there's an ongoing comic called Nancy that's been running since 1938, that I've never heard of before.
Dilbert never touched Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes for me, but I enjoyed it and always read the ones I saw. Sort of... B.C. level, I'd say. Much better than Wizard of Id, or Doonesbury. Or Cathy.
I'm pretty sure Cathy is the one I was thinking of, maybe subconsciously I was somehow aware of a comic called Nancy. Doonesbury, Wizard of Id were others in the same tier but I couldn't remember the name of either. I went through a period of obsession with Pogo, which I think is the only other strip to reach the heights of C&H for my tastes.
C&H is the GOAT - says this comics nerd. Far Side and Walt Kelly's Pogo round out the top 3. In the next tier of greatness you have Peanuts, Dilbert, Bloom County, the classic Krazy Kat, R. Crumb, maybe a few others. There is nothing comparable coming out now.
No Bloom County? You must be younger than me.
Probably. Even so, Bloom County lives again: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheBloomCountyBoys
If you grew up in the Antipodes, throw in Footrot Flats.
Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Zits (depending on your age), and Get Fuzzy (likewise). Peanuts if you were older.
Garfield was optional, for some reason I did it. Bad judgement.
Sherman's Lagoon should have been mandatory, but apparently it was relatively obscure.
No, there are at least 3 of us.
Same. Probably an element of people in the spectrum liking explanations of social interaction framed in that way
I was also the kid reading "The Dilbert Principle" in 5th grade for some inexplicable reason
Me as well. So weird how common this seems to be!
There are dozens of us
Dozens!
Same
I was also an avid Dilbert fan in elementary school. I still have my collections on a shelf behind where I am currently sitting.
I suspect it's not a coincidence. I think his writing works well if you're interested in the subject, but not really familiar with it. I remember thinking his writing about pop physics was cool when I was a kid, but then when I later studied physics in college I realized how much that sort of pop physics gets wrong in important ways. Likewise, when I later became a software engineer, I thought that it was *sort of* like Dilbert but not really at all. Like, OK, we had cubicles and used computers, but that's about it. The engineers were well-respected, the managers were also smart (usually they were former engineers), and we didn't waste a lot of time in meetings. All the things that a nerdy 10-year-old or ex-banker-turned-cartoonist might think to look down on didn't really exist.
Count me among the folks who loved Dilbert as a child. I think part of this is that early Dilbert was less workplace focused (like with the dinosaurs) but it the strip also has a sense of humor that's goofy and pokes fun at authority, both of which are very appealing to kids.
I also remember reading his "Law of Attraction"-like content in The Dilbert Future at summer camp in the 90s and thinking he was maybe kind of nuts.
Reading this post, it almost seems like Adams may have lost his mind through normal age-related cognitive decline -- there's a definite thread of increasing paranoia. In addition to the burrito anecdote in the post, you also see it in his revisionist history of why his TV show failed, originally he said it was because the timeslot was awful, later he said it was due to anti-white racism.
The Dilbert cartoons weren’t realistic, but I did find many of them funny when I was working as a software engineer. I particularly remember Adams’ take on the Lucent logo (June 11 & 12, 1996).
1996-06-11: https://ia801605.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/23/items/dilbert-1989-2023-complete.-7z_202303/Dilbert_1989-2023_complete.7z&file=1996%2F1996-06-11_new%20company%20logo_brown%20ring_quality.gif
1996-06-12: https://ia801605.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/23/items/dilbert-1989-2023-complete.-7z_202303/Dilbert_1989-2023_complete.7z&file=1996%2F1996-06-12_new%20logo_sloppy_unimaginative_money%20to%20consultants_little%20return_too%20good_opinions.gif
Thanks for posting the links.
Same, though I only kept rereading the Dilbert Principle until high school when I discovered his blog.
I wanted to put a 90% prediction that someone in the comments would say they did as well. Congratulating myself.
Here is a great post apocalyptic comic made with Dilbert art: https://kalebhorton.ghost.io/the-d-lbert-project/
Interesting. I'm not sure I'd call it great although I like the writing. Dilbert feels like a good vehicle to be reimagined as a vessel for existential despair, but I think the comic panels have an immediate tone which clashes with the apocalyptic tone that the artist was going for here. And small details like the boss holding the coffee mug and Dilbert staring at his monitor give a sense of ordinariness which really undercuts the apocalyptic writing. Maybe those details could have been reworked to lend impact instead (like... is Dilbert just staring at a blank and dusty screen?); but that's not the direction the artist took things in. Overall I think it would work more for me if I were a lot less familiar with Dilbert... I enjoyed the writing when I dissociated it from the visuals. But in that case, I guess I have to question what the benefit is of using the Dilbert strips in the piece.
I don't know if you've ever seen "Dilbert 2" and "Dilbert 3" by cboyardee (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9xfqMtkmN0 ). I think they're a more successful remixing of Dilbert? Definitely carried pretty hard by the music though.
Kaleb Horton, who did that comic, died a couple months ago. https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-last-magazine-writer
Among the numerous intellectual gifts I have received from reading Scott Adams is that I started reading slatestarcodex on his recommendation (which then had a huge influence on me). I had known about slatestarcodex even before, but it was Adams' recommendation that gave me the energy to overcome my reading-inertia and start poring through long articles of Alexander. The recommendation was perhaps in a post about the third of the "Scott A" trifecta, Aaronson.
Wait, he recommended Slate Star Codex?
I thought it was a respectful take overall. I'm not a fan of the idea that no one can be critical of the dead.
Absolutely, with some superlatives that I don't remember. This was more than a decade ago, I think.
I also found SSC through Scott Adams. IIRC he was recommending "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" on his blog.
I also learned of the blog of the same recommendation
Same here. Small world.
Yes, or at least linked to it. IIRC it's how I first found it.
Yes, but....
https://web.archive.org/web/20161117194224/http://blog.dilbert.com/post/153301874416/reprogram-an-anti-trumper-with-this-article
What do you think has changed in Trump's second term? All I've seen is him doing what he promised regarding illegal immigration. He hasn't declared martial law, suspended elections, or rounded up all non-whites or even all Hispanics to be put in camps. He's still boorish, prone to hyperbole, etc., but I think the wolf-crying is still going on.
Put it this way, which of these predictions our host made in that article have been proven FALSE in his second term?
1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]
3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 95%]
4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]
6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%]. {link to the Gallup poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx}
7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].
> What do you think has changed in Trump's second term? All I've seen is him doing what he promised regarding illegal immigration. He hasn't declared martial law, suspended elections, or rounded up all non-whites or even all Hispanics to be put in camps. He's still boorish, prone to hyperbole, etc., but I think the wolf-crying is still going on.
I think his increasing willingness to do things with executive orders and not through congress is worrying.
Trump might not technically be a tyrant yet, and in many cases you can point to other presidents of the last 26 years with actions that laid the precedence for Trump's actions (for example, Obama's Dear Colleague letter, vs. Trump's shakedown of Harvard), but I still think his second term has felt like he's doing actually drastic things like the Liberation Day tariffs because there aren't enough adults in the room to tell him no anymore. Sure, he walked that one back, showing he has at least some limits, but the fact he was willing to try it in the first place is not reassuring.
You can also point to things like Trump paying the military during the shutdown, even after the authorization for funding from Congress did not exist. While I'm willing to write that one off as a prudential move, it's kind of the whole game at that point, isn't it? If Trump is bringing back impoundment and not spending Congressionally apportioned money, and he's choosing to spend money without Congressional backing, then in some sense he has given himself room to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, regardless of any legal backing to do so.
There's also things like how he's handled Europe, particularly Greenland. Our European allies shouldn't feel the need to send token troops into Greenland to discourage Trump from potentially invading. Even if you think Trump never *really* intended to conquer Greenland, he said things during his first term and this one that didn't properly reassure our allies that he wouldn't do that, and that is a failure on his part.
I'm someone who used to roll my eyes at other people's Trump derangement syndrome. I felt like if Trump 2 was just more of Trump 1 it would be something America could bear. But I think a lot of his actions in Trump 2, like DOGE (which always had dubious legal authority), and his recent desires to end Fed independence are all evidence of bad judgement and worse instincts for what will be good for America.
Scott acknowledged that much of the original rhetoric about Trump was correct, in that very article. I mean, what part of "incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country" did you not understand? Scott's point was that basically every bad thing people had said about Donald Trump was correct...
*Except* for the thing about him being a super extreme white supremacist racist. Scott begged people to criticize Donald Trump for "literally anything else", because all the other stuff was true but the "racist" thing was just crying wolf and needlessly burning credibility.
Now we have the Trumpian ICE rounding up and deporting probably hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Including brown, black, yellow, and yes white-skinned European immigrants, all with the same lack of respect for due process. Hell, the German government had to issue a travel advisory to their citizens after some were subject to gratuitously abusive treatment before their unwarranted deportation.
That makes Trump a *nativist*, which is not the same thing as being a racist. Previous generations of American nativists have made non-native white people the focus of their venom; now that's more of a sideline but probably mostly because the demographics of the immigrant population have changed. Maybe nativism is wrong or even evil. You could make a good case for that if you wanted. But even so, it's a different evil than racism.
But too many people have had their minds killed by the belief that RACISM = EVIL = RACIST, that all racist people are evil and all evil people are racist and if someone is evil then "racist" is the word you use to tell all right-thinking people how evil they are and coordinate the hate. So here we have Donald J. Trump dialing all the *other* wrongness up to eleven, and you all are burning your credibility by saying "see, we *told* you Trump was super duper racist, are you ready to admit you were stupid for not joining the bandwagon by saying Trump is a racist too"?
Scott was right.
Trump runs the country like an experienced manager runs software developers -- ask what his people need, and focus on getting it for them.
He built the "wall" to Border Patrol specs (they knew what sort of "great wall of china" they wanted). He's getting Greenland for the military (ditto Venezuela).
I started SSC because he recommended you as well. I wasn't an acolyte of his, but like you mentioned above I was intrigued by some of the things he said about the Trump phenomenon that rang true. (Like how he played the media by strategically exaggerating his claims.) I followed him off and on for awhile, but he started getting into woo and making ridiculous claims/predictions/sentiments until the ratio of signal to noise became too much to bear.
Just after the election in 2016, I remember he called out your post that was titled something like, "They're crying wolf", about Trump being racist. The thrust of your post was effectively, "Media are trying to smear Trump by inaccurately branding him a racist, instead of making any of the available high-minded arguments for why you should reject his politics." I remember at the time I was mildly annoyed that you waited until after the election to make your case, but found a number of other great archive posts.
While I stopped following the other Scott because his content was only occasionally good (and less so over time). I continue to read your takes because your content quality remains strong.
Wow. Thinking about this makes me very happy.
Multiple times, yeah. More recently, he also called you "one of the most productive thinkers and extraordinary writers alive." https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1360781730068668422
(In reference to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article , for those who don't want to go archive hopping for the deleted retweet.)
I'm shocked that this is the first time you're learning about this. Life is funny that way.
What a delightful plot twist: the Scott’s were part of the mutual admiration society for each other. Very cool.
Yep. My story reading your blog goes like this: I heard about the NYT doxing you, felt some outrage and read some SSC articles, then moved on to other things. Then Adams recommended you and you went on my permanent I-want-to-pretend-to-take-a-break-from-work goto. The article I read that got me there was the one cited below, about not burning outracist accusations on Trump and thereby burning out credibility.
Funny, I first encountered SSC in a Scott Aaronson post. It's like a Web Ring of Scott.
But which is the Greatest Scott?
Canonically, Winfield.
Alphabetically, it's hard to beat Scott Aaronson.
Great Scott! That’s a hard one!
Weird to find you attribute some of your humour to Scott Adams. I've always hated Dilbert, and you're my favourite writer full stop.
Scott Alexander uses a lot of micro humor in his writing, as does Dave Berry and Scott Adam’s (in his books). It’s a rare technique but extremely enjoyable.
I don't think it's a particularly rare technique.
this is beautiful.
Noticed that you didn't write "and got cancelled" in your list of similarities.
And I hope your Thought Experiment Just A Joke from Passover-April's Fools actually works out.
>Noticed that you didn't write "and got cancelled" in your list of similarities.
Valid point.
They were both attacked by malicious journalists, but for some reason he seems to believe the same slander against Scott Adams, even repeating the lie that he went on a "racist rant" in this very article.
Gell-Mann Amnesia
Did he not say that white people should get away from black people, or something to that effect? I think I get WHY he said it, as push-back against anti-white racism, but I still find it over the top and not helpful.
Getting away from black people is a reasonable life advice, it does not imply racial hatred or hostility
And all the while, everything White people complain about is inflicted upon them at the hands of....other White people.
Clearly not everything, though I never denied a lot of woke agenda is pushed by privileged white people who never have to suffer the consequences of those policies.,
Importantly, this Scott never got significantly canceled!
Didn't he have to leave his job under his real name after the NYT revealed it?
Hmm, if so, that really is much more of a "significant cancelation" than I thought. I was thinking about the fact that his public-facing work mostly remained similar, and that most of his revenue has long been from Substack. But as I think back, I realize that he may not have switched to Substack until after that NYTimes article ran. So I underestimated the significance of this event to his career.
But it's very hard to read the New York Times article as either an attempted or actual "cancelation" - Cade Metz was clearly irresponsible in insisting on using Scott's legal name rather than the name of his public persona (I don't think similar articles insist on referring to Lady Gaga as "Stefani Germanotta"), and the article included some (in my mind justified) negative sentiment about the number of racists and reactionaries that like to hang out in the comment threads here.
But he certainly wasn't calling for anyone to fire Scott, he didn't try to make Scott any less widely read, and he absolutely didn't succeed in making Scott any less widely read, unlike the literal cancelation of Dilbert syndication in many publications.
Lady Gaga isn't a great point of comparison; while she chooses to use a stage name her true identity is well known and she has never attempted to hide it.
A better point of comparison would be the vandal known as Banksy, whose identity the New York Times choose to protect https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/arts/design/banksy-legacy.html
> But he certainly wasn't calling for anyone to fire Scott
And Henry II never called for anyone to kill Thomas Becket either, he just wondered aloud if anyone would ever do something about his turbulent priest problem.
Banksy's name is also easily found online.
Virgil Texas would be another pseudonymous political commentator that the NYT chose to protect.
>But it's very hard to read the New York Times article as either an attempted or actual "cancelation"
I mean, Scott had told Metz in no uncertain terms that he'd stop blogging to keep his name from being published, and they still were unwilling to accommodate him (unlike with many other NYT-sympathetic personalities). I don't see how this could be attributed to anything other than malice/contempt.
>negative sentiment about the number of racists and reactionaries that like to hang out in the comment threads
There was also the accusation of "alignment with Charles Murray". Ironically, this too would have been a fair point, but Scott was careful enough not to have a public quote of taboo opinions, so they resorted to using a non-taboo agreement for their heavy implication.
>But he certainly wasn't calling for anyone to fire Scott, he didn't try to make Scott any less widely read
No, he was just exposing a den of heresy to the pious NYT flock. Of course, for some not-so-pious readers it had the opposite effect, but this was deemed a tolerable tradeoff.
He switched to Substack while the NYT article was in the works but before it was actually published.
>the article included some (in my mind justified) negative sentiment about the number of racists
I wonder what you think of Noel Ignatiev and Tema Okun, if you're familiar with either? Or what you think the NYT would comment on them?
(To be clear, my position is that both are far, *far* more vile and racist than anyone that comments here, and they were/are consistently rewarded it for it, rather than causing their hosts to be abused for simply not banning them)
>he didn't try to make Scott any less widely read
He quite specifically tried to make Scott look bad and searched around for more negative comments. That he failed should not be evidence that it wasn't part of his intent- though to be fair, no one really knows his intent.
Yes, but that was because he did not want his patients to associate him with his blog, nor did he want his readers to be able to find his psych practice.
He was doxxed, not canceled. There is a difference!
I was under the impression that he chose to do so but did not have to
This is wrong. Everything happened before the NYT story ever came out.
Scott was told the NYT was going to do a story on him. The NYT reporter said he was going to use his real name in the story. Scott exploded the story by deleting SSC over it. In the fallout, he opted to leave his job so he wouldn't do psychotherapy anymore and so that his office wouldn't keep getting calls from people trying to get him fired. This is the quote from the blog at the time (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive)
"And I left my job. They were very nice about it, they were tentatively willing to try to make it work. But I just don't think I can do psychotherapy very well while I'm also a public figure, plus people were already calling them trying to get me fired and I didn't want to make them deal with more of that."
I mean, Scott is free to think of it however he wants, but what happened to Scott (though very bad) did not appear to me to be a "cancellation" in the classic sense. Possibly downstream of the same social instinct though.
One simple trick to avoid cancellation: quit before you could get fired! Mobs hate this.
More seriously, if you are a famous person, you should definitely diversify your income, not only because if 100% comes from your employment, you are leaving money on the table, but also because anything you sell becomes your *insurance* against cancellation -- the moment you get cancelled is also your 15 minutes of fame, many people will hate you, but some will come with the opposite attitude (they may be a minority, but still many in absolute numbers), and if you can convert this attention to sales, it may compensate for the lost income from your job. Many celebrities try to create controversy so that people start paying attention to them again; you get one controversy in your life for free!
Scott Alexander gained new subscribers, some of them paying. Jordan Peterson sold his online self-help courses. I wonder if Scott Adams also sold more of his books the moment he was cancelled.
This Scott never got cancelled did he? Getting doxxed isn't the same as getting cancelled.
This is excellent. Thank you for writing it.
Speaking of dopplegangers, there is a companion piece to be written comparing Adams to Bill Watterson that consists entirely of negative space surrounding the statement: "And then the cartoonist retired...."
Disagree that God's Debris is bad. However The Religion War was garbage, save for his anticipating states seeking out influencers, the ones under the radar and under the hood. Scott ended up being one such influencer, like Locke and Demosthenes in Ender's Game, except probably unwittingly state-controlled.
I think Adams' last chapter, his unshakable commitment to whatever it was he really saw as his mission, was defined by the company he kept. One post drove it home for me, when he asked, "Don't you suppose I'm in a position where I have friends/access to privileged information," paraphrased, and seeming to indicate national security concerns. In fact there is no one with true or clear information, and anyone claiming to have privileged knowledge is at best delusional.
I loved both God books, and I wasn't an edgy teenager, but in my late 20s when I read them. I was, however, in a period of fascination with the idea of a non-personal God (I also discovered Jefferson's Bible, mentioned in this article, at around the same time.)
God's Debris is enlightening. Alexander is judging it by the wrong criteria.
What did you get out of it?
I can't give specificities partly because it's been so long, but also because what I gleaned was sort of abstract. It helped cement my model of reality, it reflected some of my bigger thoughts which I had developed independently, and took them a bit further. Part of it was surprise that someone else had come to the same conclusions. I'm sure those ideas are old hat for philosophers and anyone who's studied them. But when you make them from your own knowledge, accruing that information is a different experience, and it's integrated into your understanding differently. For most people the idea of god is either a lie they tell themselves, or academic. I don't believe in god, but god exists, because everything is a quantum state. I think Scott was purely intuitional. These things can't wholly be explained because language is a limited technology.
The "unwitting state control" bit sounds like exactly the sort of paranoia Adams succumbed to.
You think that for a couple reasons. One is that you suppose if a new, digital analog of Operation Mockingbird were existent, you would know about it. But you wouldn't. The vast majority of similar programs are never known to the public. The other major reason you're able to remain blissfully unaware is that PM and associated programs are crooned on about and parroted almost exclusively by wingnuts, which discredits them so far that most people refuse to accept that factual history is even real, and in any event your mental filter learns to ignore hot button terms and topics even peripherally associated with the lexicon of said wingnuts.
YOU are unaware.
Kitty History, one two three!
Yes, there are literal disinformation experts in our Federal government, yes, they do disseminate disinformation. We can discuss whether or not this is appropriate behavior for any given case, but first you need to know that yes, this is happening.
One should cultivate a healthy skepticism of fact-checking websites, as well as "friends" you have never met.
Okay, I'll bite: which state do you think Scott Adams was being controlled by and why?
I mean, when the President and Vice President both sing accolades in the wake of your death, it's not *entirely* unreasonable to suppose that Adams may have had more insight to the inner workings of this country than the average bear.
Sure, I think he did. He also had someone whispering in his ear. That someone was an honest, credible liar.
What are we talking about here? I've been hearing just about every other podcast of Adams since 2016 (and I'm another one who made it here because of Adams' reference to slatestarcodex).
1. Adams’ was operating on what he believed to be insider knowledge, 2. He was embarrassingly wrong on some conclusions he was too smart to be wrong about, and 3. His opinions appeared at odds with mainstream, however those opinions served the interests of the true power base, which is what you should really be looking at. Not what they appear to serve, not if they go against the grain, not if they make you feel good, but who they serve.
Not buying any of that.
I do remember him mentioning in several podcasts that he was privy to information he couldn't share, but could hint at. I recall when I thought he was putting one of those magic hints out there, he heavily couched it in epistemology ("I don't know if this is just information being fed to me, but...")
I think overall Adams was pretty honest about what he was up to. He taught me how to see through BS very well.
Example: statements like "His opinions appeared at odds with mainstream, however those opinions served the interests of the true power base" trip exactly the wires Adams taught me to set up. A vague, unfalsifiable statement that could be said about anyone.
That all sounds very reasonable. Except...
He was wrong about Covid, and I wasn’t. So while he had valuable things to say, he had no credibility in the end.
Since you know so much about him, I take it you are a fan? And given that I was right about the most important tyrannical push in human history while he wasn't, may I recommend that you become *my* acolyte now?
It does sound pretty entertaining! I have a weakness for sci-fi flavored gnosticism and DIY philosophy.
>There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget
I had a boss once who did a sting as factory CFO. He noticed productivity spikes, and realised they were during the weekend, when management was off.
There's a medical study which purports to prove that mortality drops every year during the major cardiologists' conference, when all the bigshot cardiologists are away and let the residents handle the service. I don't know how much to trust it, but it's plausible and funny.
There are reasons why this might happen that don't amount to "the bigshots are mismanaging things and it works better without them there". For instance, they might delay operations until the bigshots come back, and the operations have some chance of immediate death (while increasing average long term survival).
Or at least, they might delay the more difficult operations, which get assigned to the bigshots precisely because they're so likely to go wrong.
For the love of god please adjust your use of the word "prove." This isn't a nit pick, it's something that makes any statistician want to pull out what's left of their hair. And you do it frequently (and my hairline is not in good shape).
I feel like you can't get mad at 'purports to prove', since that phrase inherently implies skepticism towards that 'proof.'
Better to say “purports to show”, since this doesn’t presuppose that “prove” is something a single study *could* do.
Provability is a property of the data set and the analysis, not of the number of studies that analyze it. You are, of course, right that it is usually the case that one study doesn't prove anything.
>Provability is a property of the data set and the analysis
...but not of reality, which is the ultimate object of study.
Any statistician would react that way? Seems statistically unlikely!
On the contrary, that ANY statistician would react that way is a certainty, because we have one doing so.
Saying that ALL statisticians would react that way is questionable, though.
Someone should do this study for OBGYNs and vaginal-birth maternal mortality. The births generally can't be delayed and the outcome is hard to miss.
Would have to exclude chemical induction, but coupd work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis did something like that, and his results support the theory.
This is a totally different theory. Semmelweis's very famous experiment was testing his theory of hand sanitization. Everyone sanitizes their hands now, all levels of provider.
It takes a special sort of *person* to be a cardiologist.
More generally, whenever physicians strike, mortality drops by 30%. I suppose that is one of the reasons physicians rarely strike.
I know that I, an engineer, will occasionally clear my plate and tell everyone to piss off so I can go solve a hard problem. Much like those judges who learn to schedule their case loads so they get lunch on time. Perhaps choosing to work on a problem on the weekend is a version of this with more subtle social graces.
One thing I like about weekends is that they’re a time I can get good chunks of work done!
Two most successful projects of my software development career happened when my manager was temporarily assigned to a different project and couldn't pay attention to what I was going. In both cases (two different companies, different managers), I successfully completed the project before the manager returned, in much shorter time than was originally planned.
I also tried starting my own company, and failed horribly. The skills needed to build a project are different from the skills needed to sell it.
I've seen this happen so often it's become a baseline assumption. I tell my clients--and these are the ones I take, the ones I think have a chance--that the work/tech/skills are 5% of what's important to the potential startup/product/company.
It's actually less than 5%, but you have to give them *something*.
In my opinion, the way to sell that hard truth to our fellow engineers is to simply ask: "what is the value of the perfect answer to the wrong question?"
The answer isn't zero, but it's also clearly less than the sum of its parts. For me it was the beginning of the road to the wisdom of asking what the customer needs, rather than what you want to build.
Very nicely put.
Bingo, it's why your first employee and generally 49.9% partner is a sales guy. I never respected sales as a profession until I worked in a small service business.
It depends on what is considered as productivity. (For example for the last ~2 years I'm working on a project and we have quite a lot of data - but not good stats - about output. There are 2 kinds of tasks. Things that add incrementally to the "product" (features, fix visible bugs) and things that incrementally add to everything else (update some dependency, rework some part of the code, make the compilation/build faster, introduce some new tool that will help use write better code).
Obviously when the product people are out the output is skewed a lot more toward the latter kind, and many times that's where the spikes are/were.
(Many times the spikes are things rushed that look good initially, but then will require a lot of rework.)
How much of this is applicable to factories (and medicine) is left as an exercise to the reader.
I thought I was the only one obsessed with Dilbert books in elementary school!
"A Famous Man", by Machado de Assis, is a short story about a man who wrote the world's best polkas, but wanted to write requiem masses. It's worth reading an the only thing I could think of during the entire first half of the article.
Sousa wrote brilliant marches, but he also wrote mediocre waltezs.
Waltzes are easy. First, write a march, then delete every fourth beat.
(Now I had to go searching for "The Stars And Stripes Forever But It's A Waltz" on youtube; sadly nobody has made that but I did find Weezer's Buddy Holly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE3RmfFJmAc )
Alan Moore is perpetually annoyed that whenever he goes on tour to promote something new he wrote, people just want to ask him about the superhero comics he wrote in the Eighties.
And I'm a guy who considers himself a big Moore fan who has never been tempted to read his prose. I am among one of the many people he would instantly dislike.
Jerusalem is really, really good.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was incensed that everyone praised his Sherlock Holmes stories, and it was clear to him that nobody would remember any of his other literary and historical works, which he considered far superior. ( I would give some examples. but I've forgotten them! )
Korney Chukovsky, who is one of the cornerstone writers of children's literature in Russian (think Dr. Seuss), lamented that people didn't value his works in the field of literary history.
The Wizard of Oz series is another notable example. Although nowadays, nobody even remembers that there was more than one, so Baum didn't even get the lasting success of Doyle.
I know about the 14 books written by Baum (plus there were many sequels written by other authors), and I hoped to read them one day, but they never got sufficiently high on my priority list. So I asked Claude for an opinion why only the first book is known, and from what it said, it seems that...
1) The sequels are also very good (and sold well), but not as good as the first book.
There are other places adjacent to Oz that we get to explore (the land of Ev, underground caves, islands). Some books have different protagonists (Tip, Ojo, Betsy Bobbin, Shaggy Man, Trot, Cap'n Bill, Inga, Tin Woodman, Ozma); some of them children from Earth, some of them natives of Oz. There are different unique ways to get to/from Oz. Halfway in the series, Dorothy and her family moves to Oz permanently. In other words, the story does not seem repetitive; there is both enough continuity and enough novelty.
However, the sequels do not have the same feeling of mystery, and the stakes are generally lower. Now we mostly know what the land of Oz is, and that it is possible to return from it. The villains in the sequels are generally less dangerous, the conflicts less existential.
The first book had a solid plot (Dorothy wants to get home, assembles a party, defeats an antagonist, gets home), the sequels feel more scattered, as author keeps inventing new parts of Oz that are not essential to the story, and the characters just kinda walk through them and adventures happen to them randomly. Also, the author couldn't resist bringing many popular characters from the previous books to the later books, so the party sometimes gets too crowded.
(Compared to other famous books with sequels: In Harry Potter you have one overarching story across all books. In Narnia, as new characters appear in later books, the characters from the previous books mostly disappear, so each book has a reasonable number of characters.)
2) The movie based on the first book was *super* famous. Then there was some complicated legal situation (different entities owned book rights, stage rights, film rights) which prevented making of a sequel. Most people actually know the movie, not the first book per se. Even the following movies were mostly based on the first movie, not the book.
One problem is that he invented the modern YA series about 75-80 years too early.
"Franchises" like Potter depend on a steady influx of readers and a low churn rate, which you can only really achieve with modern systems of advertising media and distribution. Timing is also critical--the largest number of tweens in American history occurred right about when the first Potter book dropped.
Baum's publication history, and the Baum franchise, are a fascinating study...in essence, he invented that marketing machine, including cross-branding and promotion (stage shows! dinnerware!), using tools that just weren't adequate, almost like building a US Interstate system before the automobile, or the Mayan pyramids built by a culture that did not have metalworking or the chisel. The results were incredibly impressive given the means, but part of the problem was that "Oz fans" weren't really a concept, not like the way Potter fans are now.
At around the same era (aka before world war II), you had Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, both of which managed YA for years upon years.
Yes, but without any of the 'merch' and other-media forms of Oz, though they did try to catch up starting in the 1960s. Stratemeyer publications are more usefully seen as in the pulp boys' magazine tradition, which starts in the 1870s. They didn't try to create a "world."
Even for Sherlock Holmes, I guess he also hoped to instruct the youth to proper British values and do poignant social critique (the story where the banker realizes he can make more as a pseudo-mendicant and so on) which obviously were not the ones which ended up being remembered.
I always wondered, why did he think his readers would prefer a cantankerous uncle tirade about kids these days rather than a detective story. Did he not realize it was a cantankerous uncle tirade? He thought there was no other source of avuncular commentary to be found?
>I always wondered, why did he think his readers would prefer a cantankerous uncle tirade about kids these days rather than a detective story.<
Just because they didn't have the Oscars doesn't mean they weren't making Oscar Bait.
Many people have a critique of society to be made in a "avuncular commentary."
Very few are Jonathan Swift.
Those who are, write scathing critiques of Congress that explain that since they can't get an omnibus together, they should all ride their own short buses.
... Congress did not get the joke, but they did get the point, as you can see with the "minibuses"
Come on that joke is clever but I doubt people will laugh at it 300 years later like we do with "a modest proposal".
And Doyle's moralizing stories don't even have much of humor element. I mean it's there if you squint enough, but maybe because he just wasn't much of an humorist, maybe because he was too absorbed by the moralizing to fully exploit the absurdity of the situations he concocted (the two things are in tension: if you focus on the absurdity, it's hard to convey how it Explains a Lot About Modern Times), but IMHO it shares something with the Scott Adams fiasco: man invents a new subgenre in which he excels, finds fame and riches through it, but decides to do something more "serious" at which he is mediocre at best. Even if you agree with Doyle's or SA positions, they are probably not your go-to examples of commentators, just stylistically speaking.
If people laugh about it 300 years later, it will be because it was the first step in fixing the Congressional Budgetary Issues (and because America still exists -- 300 years after Nero, nobody cared about him). There's a bit of an art in poking the people in charge, so that they actually fix impasses.
We do care about Nero, as proved by the fact most people would recognize the name (and even more would have when church attendance was higher and Sunday school a bit more graphic I guess).
And we don't laugh at "A Modest Proposal" because it maybe had some roles in swaying British policies in Ireland (arguably, it did not, just looking at the chronology), we do because it's a masterpiece. Juvenal never swayed anyone, to the extent he spoke ill of anyone he did so only *after* they were deposed and left no descendands, but we still read him because of sheer literary merit. On the other hand, plenty of pamplets that really did sway events (say, the STOP movement publications) are pretty dull and are only ever mentioned, never read.
He (Doyle) wrote the biggest English language Anti-Belgian Congo/King Leopold II book of the period, and was basically put on the Belgian govt’s shit list lol
Sullivan of Gilbert & Sullivan thought their comic operas distracted attention from his really *important* music.
Petrarch / Petrarca is eternally lionized here in Italy as a (the?) pinnacle of lyrical poetry in Italian (English speakers have no real access to the relevant poems, but know them indirectly as a major influence on Shakespeare's sonnets), but as a fan of Latin the man himself deemed his poetry in the vernacular lowly and trivial, and he thought his ticket to eternal glory would be his poetry in Latin, which hardly anyone has cared about in later centuries.
When you say relevant poems, are there others you have in mind not in Rime Sparse? I know Africa, his latin epic to which he pinned his hopes of glory, was last translated in the seventies, but are there other important pieces to which the English-speaking reader no access? Or was your comment more about translation; its lack of quality or inherent inability to preserve all poetic features?
There is no lack of translations into English of Petrarch's whole body of work, but they never manage to convey the poetic quality of the original, not even a faint shade of it. If you only read the translations you won't know why Petrarch is so celebrated in Italy.
That is a universal problem in poetic translations (including into Italian), but it's particularly bad with Petrarch.
Yes, very grave problem, for sure. I am starting to learn Italian (right now I only have english, french and spanish) to hopefully be able to read Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Bocaccio, Petrarch, and so on in the original, because it is clear, as is always so, much has been lost.
Are there underrated works of Petrarch you would recommend? I am reading a collection right now of his letters, which I believe he curated, which have been interesting.
And also, would you say that the poetic quality is largely a phonaesthetic or prosodic excellence, or does it depend on clever play with allusions and contemporary idioms. Obviously, the first is easier to learn to appreciate than the latter?
The lionization in Italy is not (only) because of his mastery of style (which is inconsistent, the Trionfi are admittedly, uh, a bit derivative) but because he basically created the language today we call Italian. After an heated debate in 1400s on what the Italian koiné should be, Bembo's position to just adopt Petrarchean style wholesale prevailed, and was adopted so enthusiastically that by the 1500s most published work, and even many private documents (eg contracts) were already written in Italian.
It doesn't really matter what you think of his poetry (the Trionfi are a bit, uh, derivative), much like it does not matter much what you think of Manzoni as a novelist, those guys (with honorable mention to the oft-neglected Goldoni) are the fathers of our literary culture. Arguably, of our entire national culture. This warrants a veneration that goes beyond literary merit per se.
Secondo me, se dici così agli stranieri, non capiscono. L'impressione che si formano leggendo le tue parole è che il Petrarca è un poeta come tanti, e l'unica ragione per cui è così famoso è che ha "creato l'italiano" tramite Bembo. Ma prova a leggere il Canzoniere accanto alle sue traduzioni in inglese. Fa quasi fisicamente male. Il punto è che se il suo stile è stato preso a modello letterario, è perché è *bellissimo*. A sostegno di questa opinione invoco l'autorità di Foscolo, Leopardi, D'Annunzio...
Comunque la lingua di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio aveva già ampiamente conquistato l'Italia ai tempi di Bembo. Il suo trattato in cui adotta la posizione di prendere Petrarca e Boccaccio a modello è del 1525. Cioè viene dopo l'Orlando Innamorato e l'Orlando Furioso, dopo l'Arcadia di Sannazzaro, dopo il Cortegiano, eccetera eccetera, insomma dopo mille opere scritte in toscano da non toscani. Anche l'uso dell'italiano nei documenti privati si era già affermato ampiamente ai tempi di Bembo, e certamente non aveva niente a che fare con il suo consiglio di versificare come il Petrarca, perché quel consiglio si applicava, e aveva senso, solo alla scrittura in *versi*. Quello che fece Bembo fu chiarire: quando scrivete in versi, il modello sia Petrarca, non Dante. Ma quanto conta oggi quell'opinione, visto che oggi Petrarca e Dante ci sembrano più o meno altrettanto lontani, o vicini, e quello che chiamiamo padre dell'italiano di solito è il secondo?
I Trionfi sono "uh, derivative" di che? delle terzine dantesche? se uno scrive in terzine un altro non può? scusa sai ma scrivili tu i Trionfi...
Sui Trionfi: vabbè de gustibus, personalmente l'ho trovato abbastanza pesante e francamente quasi autoparodico a tratti, con una struttura allegorica cervellotica e dottrinale. Non è un caso che anche nel periodo del petrarchismo più attivo, tutta la produzione letteraria ispirata ai Trionfi si sia ispirata così liberamente da trasformarsi in qualcosa di completamente diverso, una sorta di riconoscimento implicito del fatto che il Petrarca lirico fosse un sistema completo e autosufficiente, il Petrarca epico un esperimento abortivo che, eccetto qualche virtuosismo come quello di Colonna, non ha lasciato discendenti diretti (Pietrobon ha un articolo molto interessante al riguardo).
Comunque, argomento tangenziale a parte: sì assolutamente il Canzoniere ha avuto così tanto successo nel definire la nostra lingua grazie al suo successo letterario, dovuto alle sue virtù artistiche. Forse ancora più importante per il suo successo però, il liricismo petrarchesco è così versatile ma allo stesso tempo rigoroso da essere un "sistema", che si presta molto bene alla sensibilità manieristica. Una poesia può essere petrarchesca in una maniera in cui non potrà mai essere dantesca o boccacesca (beh può essere boccacesca ma significa un'altra cosa lol). Possiamo dire senza esagerare che nel tardo rinascimento _buona parte_ della produzione letteraria italiana fosse consciamente, volutamente imitativa. Concordo con te che la versione da liceo per cui Bembo semplicemente dichiara che la lingua petrarchesca sarà la koiné, Macchiavelli prova a ribattere ma non viene ascoltato, e finita lì è una semplificazione terribile. Bembo era semplicemente il più erudito e consapevole di un movimento stilistico a cui stava già aderendo buona parte dell'intelligentsia italiana.
Quindi no, Dante non è "tanto lontano da noi" quanto Petrarca. Secoli di letterati ispiratesi più all'uno che all'altro (possiamo dibattere quanto questo sia stato un accidente, o quanto sia il risultato delle rispettive scelte stilistiche e linguistiche) rendono Petrarca un autore leggibile da qualsiasi italiano istruito, Dante e Boccaccio autori che francamente sono letti più in nota che nel corpo del testo. Le Tre Corone hanno convinto l'italia a parlare toscano, ma solo Petrarca ha offerto una lingua abbastanza duttile da poter essere astratta dalle sue origini e diventare davvero nazionale.
After Stephen Sondheim died Steve Sailer and/or Mark Steyn said it was unfortunate that West Side Story was the last time Sondheim wrote lyrics for a Leonard Bernstein musical, since Sondheim was best as a lyricist despite his aspiration to writing melodies, and Bernstein was better at writing showtunes than the high-art he later aspired to (one of which was actually titled "Mass").
Sondheim's best friend as a schoolboy at the George School in Buck's County was the son of Oscar Hammerstein II, lyricist and book writer for Oklahoma, The King and I, Sound of Music, et al.
At age 15, Sondheim wrote the school musical comedy revue, "By George." Mr. Hammerstein had nice things to say until Sondheim demanded that he tell him what he _really_ thought. The great Hammerstein then gave the teen a 3 hour critique of everything wrong with his show. This could have destroyed the kid's confidence but instead it proved a landmark in Sondheim's development.
I wonder, though, whether Sondheim took from it the ambition to match not just Hammerstein but Rodgers as well.
And while Sondheim might have been either more brilliant than Hammerstein at lyric writing, unfortunately, Sondheim lacked Rodgers melodic gift.
Bernstein, on the other other hand, was, comparable. So, it's unfortunate that Bernstein and Sondheim didn't team up a few more times after West Side Story.
Bernstein was a fine enough composer; his first two symphonies are fine works in the mid-40s Yank symphonic style (the Third Symphony is an abortion), and some of his choral works (Chichester Psalms especially) are excellent (the Mass is very much not though). However, that does not change the fact that, as you say, he did have a real gift for lighter works (for example, the Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs, West Side Story of course, Candide, and so on).
Thomas Hardy wanted to be remembered for his poetry, not his novels.
If only! Then I would not have had to struggle through the wretched “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” on a high school summer reading list.
And his poetry IS remembered, though not as much as his novels.
Paul McCartney wrote some of the best pop music of all time, along with a rather dull oratorio.
All my life so far I have worked in very non-Dilbert workspaces, but I still loved his comics ever since I discovered them some time in 00's. Maybe as a reminder of how lucky I am, but frankly just because they were funny (the one about random numbers generator had me rolling). As a non-American, I didn't care about his politics, so I was just sad at his cancellation. But his obsession with hypnosis always weirded me out.
The random number generator one is great. I still remember it and tell people about it.
That's also my favourite Dilbert.
I've thought about it so many times and I still don't know the context for why Dilbert is beaten up and the other characters are some kind of monster or demon. Is he in hell? I have no idea, it probably made sense if you saw the prior strips.
I think it's from when he goes to accounting because of an error and gets taken prisoner by the trolls in accounting. It has one of my other favorite comics. Dogbert comes up to a troll with a spear guarding a door and says, "I hear you have Dilbert prisoner in there, let him go or I'll put this baseball cap on backwards and your little hardwired accounting brain will explode." In the next panel Dilbert is hanging upside down over a lot and Dogbert is standing next to him wearing a backwards baseball cap. Dilbert asks, "what was that popping sound?" And Dogbert says, "A paradigm shifting without a clutch."
_Sign Here_ is a novel where one of the upper levels of Hell is having an awful job of getting other people damned.
> when Trump went descended his escalator
Typo
hey maybe I missed the joke, but who actually said "through all these years I make experiment if my sins or Your mercy greater be."
Yeah, a google search didn’t turn anything up for this!
I got a whole stanza, attributes to George Herbert, containing the line. It seems to have been entirely hallucinated by Gemini.
I probably misremembered the exact wording, but it's from one of the translations of Omar Khayyam.
According to whatever translation is on Wikisource, you got the wording exactly right!
Totally unfamiliar with Omar Khayyam but the wiki article makes it sound interesting. Anyone got experience here?
"The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on." There, now you know the one thing about him that typical people know.
Also I think "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou"
Full quatrain:
"A book of verses underneath the bough
a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou
beside me singing in the wilderness -
O wilderness were Paradise enow!"
Fair!
LI.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
LII.
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help—for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
I don't know much about the original work of Omar Khayyam, but the translations by Edward Fitzgerald (from 1859 & following) are famous in English, reportedly have fairly little to do with the original. I think they're great. One important thing to note is that he released four major versions and they changed a lot; you'll see stanzas quoted, search a text, and not find it, because it was from a later edition. All four editions of Fitzgerald's translations are on Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam_(tr._Fitzgerald)
It's not a very long poem. Perhaps you should read it.
I think I will!
It sent Claude on a merry chase https://claude.ai/share/249fad2e-82a4-4765-bcbd-ff365f151fb5
"Through all these searches I make experiment, if my inadequacy or your patience greater be."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Quatrains_of_Omar_Khayyam_(tr._Whinfield,_1883).djvu/320
"Such as I am, Thy power created me,
Thy care hath kept me for a century!
Through all these years I make experiment,
If my sins or Thy mercy greater be."
I thought it might be St Augustine of Hippo, of "Lord make me chaste, but not just yet" fame (from his "Confessions"). But a Google AI search reveals:
The quote, "Through all these years I make experiment, / If my sins or Thy mercy greater be," is attributed to the writer and Sufi poet O K Whinfield.
More precisely, it is Edward Whinfield’s translation of Omar Khayyam (OK).
That was my first assumption. A DuckDuckGo search turned up nothing, but Google got it right.
I believe he is paraphrasing Saint Faustina "The greater the sinner, the greater his right to God's mercy," or maybe someone else who paraphrased her and Scott quoted them.
We're around the same age, and I was also obsessed with Dilbert in elementary and middle school. I had a Dogbert plush that I carried around. As someone who followed his career and writing almost from the beginning, you've captured Adams better than any tribute I've seen. Thank you.
This is a good tribute though I disagree with SA's somewhat reductionist interpretation of who Scott Adams was to a lot of people. The best obituary I've seen on him so far was actually in the Deseret News since it focused more on how he faced his own death with dignity and resolve: https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2026/01/13/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-life-lessons/
I have followed Scott Adams's podcast, in and out, since Covid, and given my more post-rationalist predilections, smoothed over some of the types of rough spots pointed out by SA in this piece. Of course, the "racist" tirade was more of a racial statement in response to a poll, that with additional context, may have not been what Adams thought it was (and also he at that point knew he had terminal cancer, so maybe was in a YOLO state of mind).
This is an instant classic (for me, at least). Thanks.
There's so much good here, I should have been taking notes. More comments will follow.
Peg Bracken's _I Hate To Cook Book_ was an earlier version of telling the truth about mainstream demands. It was simple recipes and hacks based on the premise that women don't necessarily want to cook.
I cracked up at the puffer fish cartoon. Adams really was brilliant at his best.
Scott, my condolences on choosing an ordinary-name pseud and then being confused with someone else who has a similar name because there are so many people with similar names.
One of my commenters pointed out that Adams wrote good books about how to live with ADHD.
Figuring out how the omnipresent God can make room for imperfect creation isn't just a Jewish problem. Muslims have theology about it, too. Don't ask me to do the subject justice. I'm not sure whether Christians take a crack at it.
Considered as a rhyme, "If God is so smart, why do we fart?" is a failure. Maybe something broken about the rhythm.
I will keep hammering on the question of why G-d didn't tell the Israelites to boil the drinking water.
https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/canceled-left-and-right-2025/comments
I'm hoping this is publicly available. Laurenton was a leftist, but was very disappointed that other leftists refused to believe there was serious violence happening with the BLM protests.
She got canceled, and got little or no support. When she came back strong, she was accepted by high-status feminists. It was fun, but she didn't trust them.
She swung right, and got seriously involved with Curtis Yarvin. And pregnant by him. He sued her two weeks after she gave birth.
She got canceled by the right.
Some people helped her, but very few. She found she couldn't predict who would help her.
******
"Why is a land holy?: strikes me as a very interesting question sociologically, but it's about people, not about some intrinsic quality of the land.
In re reading the books: it was Peanuts for me. And the world might have been a better place when someone could say "There's a little bit of Charlie Brown in all of us" rather than feeling that Charlie Brown is depressed and should get on meds ASAP.
I might want to read Adams' books on how to be funny.
The Gervais Principle https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
Why, and how organizations get taken over by psychopaths. Probably familiar to most people here, but maybe not known to everyone.
Thank you for the thoughtful obituary.
I enjoyed that Laurenton essay, it is indeed publicly available, thanks for sharing!
"She swung right, and got seriously involved with Curtis Yarvin. And pregnant by him. He sued her two weeks after she gave birth."
For what?
I recently posted a comment on the UK Mail Online website to the effect that the best cure for kids' ADHD was a birch (which I sincerely believe, as it is a concocted non-condition to label no more than a flighty lack of mental discipline).
I was expecting a deluge of down ticks, but to my surprise there were only a few and these were far outnumbered by loads of upticks! So I guess a lot of MO readers agree.
Which is why, of course, it responds to a variety of medications (including ones people without it do not respond to), and why you can actually spot differences in brain scans between people with it and without. Because a whole bunch of people are just making up their symptoms.
Mail Online readers are somewhere to the right of Hitler politically, but with worse fashion sense and less concern for others. Earning their approval is the sort of thing that should prompt a rethink of your life.
I dunno. He makes me want to see whether a glass in the face is the best cure for uninformed opinions.
Perhaps the first thing I ever read by Scott Alexander was an essay on LessWrong about how questions like "is ADHD a disease?" are mostly just confusion.
Yes, many people possess a flighty lack of mental discipline, just like some people lack strength. If you really want to fix your child's mental discipline without Adderall, there are actual practices to try, which don't have much to do with the birch, just like how, if you want to fix your child's weakness without steroids, beating them is at best a small part of a larger program.
An elder ADHD acquaintance who went to school back when they could hit the children still preferred the paddle to sitting still for the length of a class, and chose it nearly every day for the entirety of school.
Congratulations on finding other ignorant people, I guess.
The note about the opening to God's Debris applied more strongly to his attempt to rise to punditry. Relatively early in his blogging days, he started saying that he didn't necessarily believe everything he said; he just said it to make people think. In my day, we tended to call that "trolling." He started being really explicit about that approach during Trump's rise, making A LOT of unfalsifiable predictions of the format: "I'm not saying X is going to happen, but if it does, it is because of Y." If X happens, he claims to be right; if X does not and you claim that he predicted X, you didn't read the full sentence. "I'm not saying Trump is going to win, but if he does, it is because he uses this technique..."
Stewart Lee's *How I Escaped My Certain Fate* is another example of a humorist annotating his comedy at extreme levels of granularity, including a section on why "wool" is a funny word. I found it very interesting. Lee's powers have declined, but the book includes many of his best standup sets, which were exceptional.
Who are the Kaufmans that are referenced?
Egregiously, I combined Eric and Bret Weinstein, and Eric Kaufman, into Eric and Bret Kaufman :(
Ah, I was going to ask who the Weinstein’s are since I was pretty sure it wasn’t Harvey (or any of the people I personally know with that last name).
I always get Canadian influencer Jessica Mulroney confused with former (?) TS celebrity Dylan Mulvaney. Whenever I see one or the other it amazes me how makeup can make faces look so different to my previous recollection of her.
Apologies in advance if this post causes others to suddenly start confusing these two when they never did before!
I don't think there's room in my brain for either of those people let alone both.
"mental health health"
sorry for the low effort comment, but I saw something, so I'm saying something
Something something.
Back in the twentieth century, my wife gave me a Dilbert book, perhaps the first. I worked for a scientific publisher that had just been bought by a much larger scientific publisher; I was a copy editor, a classic "technical competence" job. I read a good chunk of Dilbert, decided it was too much like my actual work environment to be funny, and brought it in and put it on the reference shelves, anonymously.
When my employers outsourced copy editing, they sent me to a career search training workshop. It didn't actually help me with getting work (the most useful book I ever read for business purposes was Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior), but I learned about the concept of career anchors. One of them was the technical competence anchor, for people who want to master a skill and use it productively (very much me). Another was managerial competence, for people who want to learn how to run things. It struck me that businesses seemed to be run by managerial competence types, who thought that the best reward was to be given the job of managing other people, so they provided that to technical competence types, to whom managing was annoying drudgery, a little of which was needed to get the real job done. . . . I actually saw a co-worker whom I had helped train climb that ladder and be happy at doing so, so I guess it works for some people; I had gotten promoted to developmental editor, a job that suited me much better until it was abolished as unnecessary to modern scientific publishing.
> It struck me that businesses seemed to be run by managerial competence types, who thought that the best reward was to be given the job of managing other people
Yeah. Generally, it seems like these types frequently fail at modeling people different from themselves. They seem to assume that everyone is extraverted, wants to spend as much time as possible doing various social activities, enjoys working in open spaces, wants to spend their free time doing teambuilding activities, etc.
Things like "could you please stop talking for a few minutes so that I can focus on doing some actual work" seems incomprehensible to them. From their perspective, "work" means talking about stuff, making sure everyone has the same vibes, motivating each other by saying motivational things, etc. Which I guess is true about their work, but that does not apply to everyone.
>I don’t know how the musicians and athletes cope. I hear stories about washed-up alcoholic former high school quarterbacks forever telling their girlfriends about how if Coach had only put them in for the last quarter during the big game, things would have gone differently. But since most writers are nerds, it’s the nerds who dominate the discussion, so much so that the whole affair gets dubbed “Former Gifted Kid Syndrome”.
Reminds me of Snow Crash:
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the
right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I
moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years.
if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to
revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping
out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
I was thinking of that passage too (which is worrying - if this is really a universal phenomenon, why would we both think of the same single example?)
That passage is just stuck in my head like a splinter - it's iconic. Iirc it's the first page too?
It isn't, it's when the protagonist (named Hiro Protagonist. Really.) meets someone who he realizes takes that role. He doesn't get to think that anymore because the role is taken.
These days that role is jokingly taken by Chuck Norris.
imagine if there were someone who you could tell Chuck Norris jokes about and receive only serious nods and "Yup. Saw him do that. I'm the only survivor." in return.
It's been a hot minute since I've read the book, so I've clearly *not* remembered correctly, ha.
> These days that role is jokingly taken by Chuck Norris.
Which is why Stephenson is fun - he does it right.
After all, HIS Chuck Norris is a sovereign nuclear power, on top of being an unstoppable killing machine.
I think it's a pretty widespread phenomenon, but as you put it, most writers are nerds, and so the people who most define their identities in terms of violence and physical prowess are mostly not the ones dominating textual discussion.
It reminded me of a West Wing quote: "You know, there comes a day in every man’s life, and it’s a hard day, but there comes a day when he realizes he’s never going to play professional baseball."
Lines like that are memorable because they suddenly put words to a trend you've been noticing for ages and a million examples. The Trope Namer doesn't create the trope.
Given it's such a universal experience, why did nobody write about it until 1992? Why didn't Shakespeare write about it?
Why isn't there a passage in Homer where Alcathous or something realises "Holy shit, I'm really never going to be as good as Achilles, or even Hector"?
Plutarch wrote that Caesar wept reading of Alexander, regretting that he hadn't accomplished much by the same age, though I guess not foreclosing eventual The Greatness. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Caesar*.html#11.5
Good point. And Alexander, who had no greater forebears to compare himself to, still managed to cry when he compared himself to some kind of hypothetical super-Alexander who had conquered even more by an even younger age.
>In the other direction, we have a pull to focus not on Alexander, but on his father, Philip II, most notably in the work of Eugene Borza, In the Shadow of Olympus (1990). That focus has tended to see Philip as the more interesting figure than Alexander, as Philip is the fellow that built the unbeatable military system Alexander would employ; Alexander merely pulls the trigger on an invasion Philip had already designed, with an army he had already built, commanded by officers he had already trained, backed by a political structure in Greece he had already secured.
https://acoup.blog/2024/05/17/collections-on-the-reign-of-alexander-iii-of-macedon-the-great/
Everyone is standing on the shoulders of some giants.
"For there are so many worlds to conquer, and I have not even conquered one!"
I was reminded of this passage from Mishima's "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea"
At twenty, he had been passionately certain: there’s just one thing I’m destined for and that’s glory; that’s righty glory! He had no idea what kind of glory he wanted, or what kind he was suited for. He knew only that in the depths of the world’s darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near some day to irradiate him and no other.
The point of light is of course realized through the sailor's own destruction.
I just realized that that's what one of the characters in termination shock was all about.
Lol, nobody remembers Al Bundy? Love the quote.
Hey, coach *did* put him in for the last quarter of the big game. How else would he have scored four touchdowns?
I never read much Dilbert, but I'll stick up for the TV show version which I found hilarious as a kid. I still regularly borrow the quote:
"I told them anthrax wasn't a skincare product!"
"No you didn't"
"Well, I was thinking it real loud"
RIP to a guy whose life was much weirder and more interesting than I ever realized.
Agreed that the TV show was pretty good!
+1 to the TV show being solid, I came across it because I wanted more dilbert content after reading the books.
The only bit I ever saw was when the doctor diagnoses Dilbert with "The Knack" and that was pretty darn funny.
Oh man, I see a lot of myself in this portrayal of Adams, even though my politics differ from his and (I'd like to think) my personal flaws aren't nearly as extreme.
I think nerds are very prone to overcontrol traits, and Adams is an extreme case of this. They cope with disappointment and hardships by trying to exert more control over themselves and the world. For nerds specifically, the tool of control is obsessive thought and raw intelligence. There's a feeling that you can achieve any goal if you analyze and systematize it enough. Accepting or working with your limitations is not an option.
This is especially insidious because many of us don't encounter the limitations of these traits until adulthood. They work plenty well for succeeding in school, and even in many early-career, individual contributor roles. At that point it becomes easier to think these traits stopped being useful for you because you're not applying them hard enough, or because there's something wrong with most other people, than to think that your approach to life may have flaws or limitations.
Scott mentions that many nerds cope with this by swinging the other way, and embracing EQ or ADHD diagnoses or critiques of modernism. While there might be some wisdom in these approaches, I think many of these jaded nerds are still exhibiting flawed, overly rigid thinking about the problems of rational modernism.
It's interesting, I think I'm very obviously a nerd, but I don't recognize myself in "They cope with disappointment and hardships by trying to exert more control over themselves and the world"
Not to say I don't have any tendencies like that, but I think my variety of nerd-dom is more... Passive? Less agentic? Less interested in controlling the world than in understanding it? I'm usually ok with some disappointment if I can understand why it happened; if I can convince myself that it had to be this way because of general principles or blah blah blah.
Fair! To be clear I think the overcontrolled nerd is just one type of nerd, though a common type.
You're just a laid back nerd. We exist and actually in large numbers, though tend to less hostility online for obvious reasons. Which is too bad bc at this point I've almost become a nerd-hater, solely bc the loudest ones online are so overrepresentative of the narcissistic/dominance-oriented/hostile variety.
But this seems like a compulsive behavior that can really bite you in the ass, when you don't have time/energy/guidance/data/textbooks (to escape from the problem) to understand (or otherwise engage with) Some Bad Thing.
Also as we see with the dear Other people, they (!) don't have a problem with obviously (!!) false explanations. (I mean confirmation bias, echo chambers, etc.)
I think it's important to contrast your "passivity" with the general population, where the norm is the complete abso-fucking-lutely gaping absence of the need for understanding. (The majority is really silent. They have kids, work, family, snow to shovel, grass to cut, whatever, they do things, listen to a podcast during commute, and that's it.)
They don't read strange rationalist blogs and don't comment about how passive they are, no? :)
Some serious insight here that I only can see with hindsight as a 53 year old. "{Nerds] cope with disappointment and hardships by trying to exert more control over themselves and the world... it becomes easier to think these traits stopped being useful for you because you're not applying them hard enough" That's a potent summary of my first 40 years. It was only because of sufficient failures that I started to question my "intelligence" and began developing some wisdom. I imagine that would have been much harder and might never have happened if I had achieved the success and fame Scott Adams did.
I wish I could send this comment to 20-year-old me.
I think this is true, but I don’t think this applies only to “nerds”.
I sometimes feel the concept of “nerd” is used past the point of usefulness on this blog.
I identify with a lot of this, especially having been a Dilbert-reading nerd in my teens. Ninety percent of this essay is brilliant — smarter and realer than anything anyone else has written about Adams — but the end lost me. It's too generous, to the point of being a whitewash. Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism. I don't think it's right to "hand it to him."
I was going to say that ~40% of american blacks disagreeing with "it's okay to be white" seemed legitimately disturbing to me if you apply any kind of literal interpretation to the sentiment. How do you cease being white, exactly?
But yeah, great article otherwise.
I don't really get how this is responding to my comment, but I would say obviously it is not appropriate to apply a literal interpretation that is completely devoid of context.
I'm suggesting that we might have a very different perception of what qualifies as hateful or 'fascist'. "It's okay to be white" should be considered a totally unobjectionable statement, end of story.
Sure, and if you take them purely literally, the 14 words ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children") are also unobjectionable. But words and phrases have meanings, sometimes quite obvious ones, beyond their literal definitions.
I thought the original context/subtext behind "it's ok to be white" was "many Americans nowadays are so radicalized on the subject of race that even such a mundane statement engenders feelings of irrational hostility, thus by putting up posters with this slogan on it around college campuses and cities as a prank, we can observe the overreaction, have a laugh, and maybe change some minds by showing how crazy these people are". Is there some context I'm missing?
They are unobjectionable. It's the reflexive consignment of any non-fascist who articulates that sentiment into the same bucket that guarantees you will have no way to separate fascism from reasonable demands for national or ethnic autonomy.
Probably better to use an example with reversed politics to get them to understand. Like asking them why so many people disagree with "black lives matter".
The stereotypical response to "black lives matter" from the enemies of the political movement is "yes, all lives matter," i.e., agreement with the surface text but disagreement with the more radical claim it implies. Is there a response to use to "it's OK to be white" that similarly reflects agreement with the surface text but disagreement with the more radical claim it implies?
Can you explain what you find objectionable about those fourteen words?
Would you find them objectionable if we swapped the word "white" out for any other race?
yeah, it’s a fucking neo-Nazi slogan
That was Ilya's original point, that--though the words are unobjectionable in themselves--context matters. Maybe you're not familiar with the context of this saying? It is such a core and well-known white supremacist slogan that any white supremacist (or white nationalist, as they often call themselves now) knows what you mean if you say "14 words" and will assume that you are one of them. It's practically a password.
The *point* is that it's technically, in a vacuum, true and harmless, but *in context* it means some quite disturbing things beneath the surface.
The trouble with "It's okay to be white" is that a phrase like this, when put on a billboard or used as a slogan, is presenting itself as a corrective. The message of the phrase "Black lives matter" is unequivocally "the police have been acting as though black lives don't matter, as though it's not as big a deal to kill a black person as a white person, and that must change." The slogan "All lives matter"--literally true as it is--presented itself as a corrective to "Black lives matter," thus implying that the point of "BLM" was a different one, namely the idea that ONLY black lives matter. In a somewhat similar way, "It's okay to be white" implies "broad and powerful swathes of the culture has been telling you it's bad and not okay to be white, and so this simple and obviously true statement is needed as a corrective." It's not just a simple, obviously true, neutral statement about being white--in *context*, it's a political statement, just like all the others quoted here.
I say this as someone who wrote a blog post titled "It's Okay To Be White." Which made the points I've made above along with the point that it is indeed literally and simply okay to be white.
I truly hope this was the sincere question I treated it as, by the way.
That's a great example
The instigating "Black Lives Matter" has the same issue.
I feel like this is missing the point. If you treat the polling result with a pinch of grace, it seems clear that the 40% in question is simply people who are aware that the phrase "It's okay to be white" implies the speaker is very right-wing, and generally has certain beliefs about race that go beyond the object-level content of the sentence. No one who had heard the phrase was evaluating it on its literal content, which is hardly a unique artifact of black people. See also every poll taken once something Trump says has percolated enough that everyone understands the poll is *actually* asking about whether you like Trump.
40% familiar with a 4chan prank-phrase? Do you really think the proportion of blacks who dislike whites is near-zero?
It's not at all hard to discern the intent of announcing "It's okay to be white" without being familiar with 4chan. All you need is American culture. Were most white people you know mystified by the phrase "Black lives matter"? If you announce a simple, obvious thing like that, you are implying that a lot of people think, or act like, it's untrue.
This is obvious to me and I know almost nothing of 4chan.
One thing that high-decouplers can never wrap their head around is that in low-decoupler English, phrases often don't mean what you would get by a mechanistic analysis of the grammar and the words contained in them. In fact, it is almost impossible to convey a meaning like the one "it's okay to be white" has when evaluated under mechanistic semantics in LDE at all. (What a clunky language!)
At the very least, a rule like the following is in place as part of LDE semantics: every phrase that sounds like a political slogan includes in its meaning the assertion that this phrase "needs to be said", that is, that there is a significant number of people who disagree with it and need to be opposed. You are interacting with people in whose language there is no short utterance that means "it's okay to be white" as you understand it, and who moreover confusingly have an identical-*sounding* utterance that means (in your language) "there are some people who think it's not okay to be white, and we need to put them in their place".
And more confusingly ... we have no idea when a phrase becomes this politically charged. (Sure, if suddenly Trump starts to use this maybe. But going to some random street corner and asking people one questions, it's very hard to gauge their semantics. Well to be fair, there are some people who do wear their affiliations on themselves. The stereotypical archetypes, but even then it's not clear how up to date they are with the ideology, etc.)
What is the context?
Our host has a post on survey responses https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
Is it appropriate to apply a literal interpretation devoid of context to Adams' reply then?
You can find all sorts of horrible things 40% of americans believe. People dont think these questions through to logical outcomes.
I actually found Adams' reaction to this a bit crazy - the poll was that 20% of blacks were against the phrase and 20% unsure, with 60% saying it was okay. I bet those are better numbers than you could get among white people!
You're playing fast and loose with the numbers here. Among black people, it was 53% agreed (that “it's okay to be white”) , 26% disagreed, and 21% were not sure (source: https://x.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1629886078298603520/photo/1).
For white people, the stats were signifcantly better: 81% agreed, 7% disagreed, 13% not sure.
It doesn't help that the “unsure” option here is pretty damning in itself.
If I stated that I'm unsure if women deserve voting rights, unsure if black people are inferior to whites, unsure if homosexuals should be stoned to death, and unsure if Hitler killed enough Jews, would you think of me as an unusually wishywashy respondent, or would you think I was one of the worst people you ever encountered?
So I definitely understand the concern about the outcome of the poll _when taken literally_. What keeps me sane is the assumption that most people who answered "disagree" or "not sure" did not want to be seen as endorsing a 4chan trolling campaign (but even then, the number of "strongly disagrees" is concerning).
This is itself a pretty silly read of the poll though. It's a bit like polling conservatives on the phrase "black lives matter". Approximately no one thinks that the question is actually about the truth value of the phrase, and people answered accordingly
I explicitly acknowledged that at the end of my comment.
I'm still not happy about it, because of how selective this argument is made. We can both do the thought experiment where pollsters ask white people “black lives matter: agree or disagree?” (which is something they haven't done, as far as I know: they ask explicitly about the Black Lives Matter movement/organization which is a different thing. I strongly agree that black lives matter, but I disagree with the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement such as defunding the police, and on a poll I would not substitute the latter for the former).
Then imagine it turns out only about half of white people agree that black lives matter (because they interpret the question as support for #BLM), and a black cartoonist crashes out about it online, saying he doesn't feel safe living in a white neighborhood when apparently half of his white neighbors doesn't believe his life matters, and so on.
What do you now think would happen in this race swapped scenario? Would the consensus be that he was overreacting, because obviously when whites say black lives don't matter, they only mean they don't want to defund the police, and actually he is the racist for even thinking they would be so callous, so his cartoons get pulled from publication, etc.?
I think we both know the answer to that. And it's that double standard that people are getting increasingly tired of: an ostensibly racist or unfair statement made about white people is always something white people aren't allowed to get upset about because <insert postmodern sophistry about privilege that people are also fed up with>, while anything a white person says can be taken in the worst way and none of the excuses you'd make for black people would ever apply to white people.
I do think that Adams was stupid for taking the bait, when there seems to be no upside to it. He should have known that as a white guy he would be vilified for calling black people racist, whether he was right or wrong. The only explanation I have is that he let his emotions get the better of him. He was only human, after all, or the whatever lesser animal white people are allowed to call themselves these days.
> "I think we both know the answer to that. And it's that double standard that people are getting increasingly tired of: an ostensibly racist or unfair statement made about white people is always something white people aren't allowed to get upset about because <insert postmodern sophistry about privilege that people are also fed up with>, while anything a white person says can be taken in the worst way and none of the excuses you'd make for black people would ever apply to white people."
Yes, this, exactly. Thank you.
Honestly, I have trouble considering your hypothetical. It's a silly one.
Black people make up 13% of the country. Only 6% of _that_ number make over 100k on an individual basis (so .007% of the total pop). Even if I grant that sociopolitical context doesn't matter at all (though obviously it does; as an intuition pump, a billionaire stating "fuck the poor" rings differently from a poor person stating "fuck the rich"), trying to imagine such and such person who is at all relevant in the public sphere who hypothetically has a crash out is silly, because that person doesn't exist. You have to come up with a hypothetical person to justify dismissing the seriousness of the actual, real person saying actual, real heinous things that is in front of you. This is fake grievance.
Fwiw the only people who can get away with saying shit like what you're implying are professional activists. Colin Kaepernick did far less and the President of the country demanded he be fired, which he was
You're right that I misremembered the numbers, sorry.
Was it actual fascism or literal fascism? I get confused sometimes.
I wish I were as clever as you. I rolled my eyes at “actual fascism” but decided not to engage.
I know I shouldn't but sometimes I let my baser impulses get the better of me.
what is clever about this?
They're mocking your idiocy.
I think everybody agrees it's literally Hitler.
This also helps them get elected.
You are buying the line from malicious journalists. He never did anything viscous or hateful. He just said the things that the progressives don't want you to be allowed to say.
Viscosity is relative, it's very different whether the comparison is water or tar.
Yeah, I got this feeling, too. I don't think it was the author's intent, but he did end up saying some apologist/sympathizer statements that really diminish what Scott Adams stood for.
"Adams is easy and fun to mock - as is everyone who lives their life uniquely and unapologetically."
- He's easy to mock because he's said horribly racist bullshit. He was not being mocked due to little quirks or differences.
"And whatever the value of his ideas, the community seems real and loving."
- It's likely the community had elements of love, especially towards on another. But when you speak hateful messages, you're going to have a community built on the basis of accepting and maybe even reveling in bigotry.
I think the author really should've actually sat more with what he "didn't want to learn" from Scott Adams. He alludes to it, but the post itself mostly focuses on the positives without actually delving into the hateful bigotry that Scott Adams perpetrated unapologetically.
"He's easy to mock because he's said horribly racist bullshit. He was not being mocked due to little quirks or differences."
I was mostly mocking his religious stuff and his burritos, though.
He never said any "horribly racist bullshit" only reasonable if a bit harsh stuff
He straight up said that white people shouldn't interact with black people, and that black people should be defined as a hate group. This was based off a poll that sampled 130 Black Americans (which is ~.00026% of Black Americans) and asks them if a white supremacist phrase that originated from 4chan is ok.
What part of that is reasonable? What part of that isn't racist?
That's even before you look at a post-analysis of the survey taken. The analysis straight up debunks the conclusions taken from the rasmussen poll: https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-white-rasmussen-poll/
>He's easy to mock because he's said horribly racist bullshit.
Not enough people mock noel ignatiev or tema okun. They kind of got around to mocking Robin Diangelo but it took too long.
Mfw a normie blue-triber comes into the ACX comments section.
I mean, I think you're doing fine, we've just have our own set common shared beliefs, which just happen to include, "acknowledging that racism is bad, but not really having a strong reaction to it".
I imagine most of the ACX readership is middle to upper-middle class whites and Asians, so we don't usually experience these things on a really personal level. So instead we take a more "outside view" look at this general trend of people getting canceled and pivoting to being right wing "grifters" - it happens so often that it's hard to decry it as (entirely) personally failing and instead a feature of the system. Scott (Alexander) says as much in the article itself. I mean Scott (Alexander, and also kind of Aaronson) himself/themselves was/were cancelled for his/their comments of feminism, but both resisted being right-wing grifters (I'd say, especially Aaronson).
(I will say, experiencing anti Indian racism over these last few months has immediately made me much more empathetic to the woke left. So consider this a data point that perhaps in the name of epistemic humility we in the ACX commentariat reconsider our priors)
Maybe I'm naive, but I think it should be pretty easy to stake a position which is opposed to actual racism without engaging in the abuses of the woke left, and I think less of the woke left for not taking such a position.
> I think it should be pretty easy to stake a position which is opposed to actual racism without engaging in the abuses of the woke left
I basically tautologically agree that the abuses were bad (thus the word "abuses"). But also, being more empathetic, I understand more viscerally why/how they happened. And having gone through that experience, I think it is really hard to understand how it feels until you have actual elected officials calling your ethnic group racial slurs and demanding your / your family's deportation.
It's generous to assume that he independently reinvented Lurianic Kabbalah - more likely he read about it in New Age/metaphysical book and repackaged it.
1. "This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all."
Compare with the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
2. "I only know about this because Scott Adams would start each of his book collections with an essay, and sometimes he would talk about letters he got from fans, and many of them would have stories like these."
Adams had a public email address where readers could email him stories of workplace cluelessness. Adams used much of this as fodder for Dilbert strips, and said that he had more than he could use in several lifetimes, the only challenge was to cherrypick the best.
3. Adams' philosophical works sound like someone trying to be Socrates and getting a Temu version of same.
4. What's a "O.W.T.O.C."?
Obsessed With Their Own Cleverness.
Thanks!
A self-fulfilling acronym.
Haha, I figured it started with "Overton Window" and was clueless about the rest, but happy enough with my amount of cleverness
"Adams used much of this as fodder for Dilbert strips, and said that he had more than he could use in several lifetimes, the only challenge was to cherrypick the best."
I think he also said there were some he couldn't use because they were too extreme.
I am sure that many were too unbelievable, even for a comic strip.
Real life has its own logic. If it happened, it happened, no matter how unbelievable.
Fiction however has to be believable.
In fairness to the "one time the manager leaves and everyone becomes 10x as productive" gag, when my manager at Google had a month's leave this absolutely happened. If you've only ever had good or at least okay managers this probably sounds like an exaggeration (this wouldn't have happened with anyone else I've worked for) but there absolutely are managers whose absence can drive productivity like this.
Fantastic obituary. Never read Dilbert and I thought the guy was just another MAGA loser. Thanks for the reminder to be generous.
You're missing out - it dropped off later, but the early stuff is gold. You can read most of them at https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-01-01 .
Re: Scott Adams + Elon Musk
Dilbert had a short run where there was this guy inventing a "hyperloop" but refusing to do any work to make it happen. https://automotivehf.weebly.com/blog/hyperloop-dilbert
*EDIT* Did the strips change during a reload? There was a black-and-white one about founding a start-up while still working at their current company but I don't see it any more
The BW strip is still in my email so yeah I think Scott was doing some live editing
Hermain Cain died of COVID, doesn't he count as a major presidential candidate?
That was my gloss of his longer prediction, which named Trump, Biden, and Sanders.
Also republicans were hunted. Jan 6 was that hunt. I can’t respect the politics of ignorance any more than you respect Scott’s insights into our political zeitgeist. It’s truly amazing how many otherwise smart people make the assumption that politics is anything other than persuasion in service of incentives. And then pretend the incentives don’t exist, and democracy is real. All with the smug assumption that their unexamined beliefs make them “good.” Is the virtue signaling anti racist who uses the correct pronouns but stays far far away from the people he champions any better than someone like Scott, who dared to say something aloud that might easily be viewed as common sense? How many middle and upper class blacks feel the same way about hate whitey? How many smug smarties are eager to live among people who think hate is okay? Are we allowed to admit that racist blacks exist? Perhaps you assume that potentially hurty words are worse than being able to speak about uncomfortable topics, even at the cost of being wrong? Or is that - gasp - right wing? I enjoyed most of your essay and if Scott still exists in some form he’s surely laughing his ass off to see you fall into the same trap you diagnose in him.
"Also republicans were hunted. Jan 6 was that hunt."
They were not being hunted in January 6th. Except the vice-President, whom I recall the mob breaking into the Capitol were shouting that they wanted to hang.
Jan 6 was a hunt of both Republicans and Democrats that some people wanted to kill. Trump pardoned the hunters in order to express dominance over both Republicans and Democrats.
Were there or were there not calls to hang Mike Pence? Were there or were there not people tearing off bits of furniture inside the capitol building? Who has actually been hunting Republicans?
No pardons for the planted pipe bombs were received. Please try again, good sir.
I'm not sure what pipe bombs you're talking about, but there were many people who tried to break into the Capitol to attack Republicans and Democrats, and they all got pardons.
You're telling me you don't know why the FBI wasn't at the capital? There were pipe bombs planted at the DNC and RNC (presumably not by the "mob" because that would actually imply planning -- and they did eventually "catch the guy").
He tweeted that his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within a year” - next tweet "Republicans will be hunted". J6 is not an example of Republicans being hunted and killed en masse, is it?
Well, I suppose on J6 Republican politicians were hunted by Republicans.
Bailey: "Republicans will be hunted in the streets."
Motte: "Some Republicans involved in a riot were overcharged for political effect."
I think he actually meant Republicans (and Democrats) were being hunted during the January 6 riots themselves, by Republicans.
Overcharged?
also, didn't Biden have a minor scandal in 2012 where he claimed that a Romney win would "put black people back in chains"? Point being that political partisans of all stripes make inflammatory exaggerated claims and predictions all the time. I did not see Scott Adams' prediction as particularly exceptional in that respect. Ideologues gonna ideologue.
Trump nearly died of it but for access to experimental therapies. Chris Christie too.
Funny coincidence - The past days I had a similar long lasting back and forth with ChatGPT, wife and The Internet (TM) over Adams. Besides Adams had demasked himself as a moron past years Pascals Wager was one of the main themes. I even put your extremely long post into this exact chat and just asked: "what is Scott saying about this? <link>".
And we had this line:
"With hindsight, his talent for caricaturing dysfunctional personalities reads less like satire and more like unusually honest introspection.
...
Over time, it becomes hard to tell where observation ended and self-description began."
Our chat endet like this:
"The irony is hard to miss:
A man who spent his life claiming to see through cognitive fallacies ended up relying on one of the oldest and most controversial fallacies in philosophy."
My new long-term chat is called:
“How to avoid falling into the hubris trap as an above-average intelligent white male over 50 who has been building his own internal world model for decades.”
Turns out the hardest alignment problem is aligning your own world model with reality.
Apparently most psychologists went into the field to try to figure out what's wrong with themselves.
It doesn't really work. Or at least fixing it is usually unsuccessful. I suppose diagnosis and cure are separate things.
indeed ;-)
I expect that's true of many doctors. Opthamologists probably have worse eyesight.
My dermatologist said exactly this of himself as did my neurologist.
I hope it's not true for most surgeons.
100% of his last three books plagiarized Charlie Munger
Very thoughtful eulogy, thanks!
Two comments:
one, I'm not particularly surprised about the Lurian Kabbalah variations in a book written by a gentile - apparently those ideas have made the round in Western esotericism for a while; I first heard of "kliffoth" through the Swedish metal band Therion (whose lyrics are basically an anthology of esoteric and mythological concepts). Since then, I have learned that the idea that the divine fragments try to reassemble into a self-aware universe where God can see himself is fundamental in many flavors of gnosticism, including Hegel and Marx.
Second, while Adams was initially somewhat vague about whether he supported Trump, he clearly admired the skill he saw in him; what was conspicuously absent from his analysis was any worry whether Trump would use his powers for good or evil. The notion of Trump as an extremely skilled manipulator has stood the test of time, though - that a New York real estate billionaire with well-known connections to organized crime was elected because he was seen as a champion of the common man against the corrupt elites is so absurd, I can't really find a better explanation.
What makes you think the common man doesn't want a criminal in charge?
America only has two political parties, so politics is a zero sum game. It is not surprising things go to extremes. It is only surprising it has taken this long. Clearly, the elites were saving democracy in America from the American people.
Well for one thing, Trump's popularity has tanked once people started seeing the reality of his second term.
That's every President though.
His popularity fell when the median voter thought he was to blame for any price rises. It did not fall when the median voter saw his supporters storm the Capitol screaming that they wanted to hang the vice-President. That was something the median voter cared nothing about, and the median Republican primary voter was enthusiastic about.
"America only has two political parties, so politics is a zero sum game. It is not surprising things go to extremes. "
What theoretical model would predict this? Median Voter Theorem for example would predict that a two-party system shouldn't give rise to extremes.
The primary system.
Indeed, in reality I think there's barely a bee's dick of difference between the two parties in the US.
The only extreme thing about US politics is the extremity of the feelings that people have about the miniscule differences between the parties. The actual policy differences are barely existent.
The para that begins "The final quarter of the book is a shockingly original take on the Lurianic kabbalah" seems to be a good match to some elements of Dune post-God Emperor.
Fascinating, learn something new every day etc etc.
Reading the dilbert blog from 2016-2018, I kept waiting for deep insight that never arrived. His attitude - I’m too brilliant to have to explain and specify my ideas coherently - is a sign that the wizard pose is all there is, and you should stop reading. Frank Lloyd Wright was proud his buildings didn’t work because they were really works of art. Maybe, or perhaps the disfunctionality is evidence that he’s a bad architect and the marketing is all there is. Scott Adams claimed to be a master of marketing / bullshit in a world built upon and full of bullshit. Great, but since it’s admittedly bullshit, maybe it’s better direct attention towards those who build on solid intellectual grounds, whose buildings never have leaks nor gaps between walls that don’t fit together.
This might be one of Scott’s best (and most heartfelt?) posts yet. Didn’t expect that from a post about the Dilbert guy!
Yep, I came here to say essentially the same thing. This was a great post! I shared it widely.
I've shared it, but I've resisted the temptation to share it in a progressive space.
To share a different perspective on Adams, my uncle was an avid follower. He went from being a principled libertarian whose ideas I respected very much to (I'm sad to say) an alt right bigot. Under the influence of Adams, he had no interest anymore in objective truth or the actual scientific method. Reality was all a matter of spin and "persuasion."
The phrase "post truth" gets thrown around too much, but Adams fit that description perfectly.
Yeah, one thing I failed to really address is the weird conflict between Adams saying all the right stuff (talking about how you need to be data-driven, not let your partisanship get the better of you, be really careful with the mentally corrosive effects of social media, etc), and having unbelievably stupid takes on social media that were obviously his letting his partisanship get the better of him. I didn't address it because I mostly tuned out of Adams after he went crazy, and also because I don't understand it. The best I can do is a combination of "he got old" and "you need to be rational -> I am more rational than other people -> in order to prove this, I must show myself right more often than the experts -> being easy prey for any form of dumb contrarianism that comes along". I still don't feel like I really understand it.
There was definitely an effect of "If the experts aren't all they're cracked up to be, the conspiracy theorists must therefore be right about everything."
The world would be a better place if more people learned the phrase "Reversed stupidity is not intelligence" and repeated it to themselves regularly.
Is "driven mad by social media" a possibility?
Certainly, I've seen this happen to several of my relatives in the same generation.
When I thought about it, I realized I was rather zoomed out myself, but I'm going to kick the idea round with examples of other people and see what turns up.
Rush Limbaugh-- I first got interested in the idea of influence by the audience when I was working up a good hate against Rush Limbaugh, and then I realized he couldn't become !Rush! !Limbaugh! without an audience who wanted to hear the kind of thing he said. It's very flattening to start to work up a good hate and then realize it's not entirely justified.
Wim Hof, the cold water plunge guy, who I've mostly learned about from Scott Carney. While there were some things wrong with Hof, Carney says that part of what went wrong was the demand for new and more extreme material because the algorithm gets bored. Combining hyperventilation with being in cold water has killed some people.
Candace Owens, who has been making more and more extreme claims without evidence and is now facing a lawsuit from the Macrones because she insists Brigitte Macrone is really a man (don't ask unless you want a distraction from current politics). Is Owens large audience just watching her for the crazy, or do they believe her? Probably some of both.
So, Adams. There's certainly an audience for pro-Trump material, but perhaps Adams' audience's worst influence was tolerating him being mediocre at great length.
I think it's definitely true, but too zoomed-out - I wish I had more of a gears-level explanation for why/how that happened.
One of Scott Adams's beliefs, which he talked about a lot, is that there's no such thing as free will, it's just an illusion. I don't really agree with him on that, but I have to say that his life story kind of makes me wonder if he was on to something there. It seems like a guy who was very self-aware about all of his problems, knew what he should do to avoid them, and then... did them anyway. It's like those people who go into a casino and say "I'm just here for the experience, I'm not going to waste my money gambling" and then very quickly go broke gambling all their money away.
There's even something he wrote (I think on his blog? I'm not sure, it was many years ago) that seems to forewarn his later fall from grace. He wrote something like "I've accepted that, no matter what I do, I'll always just be known as 'that Dilbert guy.' Nothing else I try will really catch on. Unless maybe I go crazy and stab someone to death, then I'd be known as 'that stabbin' Dilbert guy.' " He seemed fully aware that he'd never get famous for anything other than Dilbert unless it was epicly bad. I wonder how that younger version of him would feel about all the newspaper obituaries that basically refer to him as "That racist Dilbert guy."
I think Adams is basically correct. Yes, facts and evidence do exist and are real; but they have virtually no impact on anything socially important -- i.e., on anything important whatsoever. Memes and charisma and persuasion are what matters if you want to achieve life goals that extend beyound yourself and your immediate family.
For example, even if you were some kind of an esoteric weirdo whose one ambition in life is to build a fusion reactor, then sure, you'll need to learn a lot of facts about magnetic fields and plasma densities and so on. But you'll also need a team. You'll need funding. You'll likely need government support. Even if you do manage to build this fusion thing by yourself in a cave with a box of scraps, you'll need marketing and word of mouth, or else the world will never know about your brilliant invention and thus remain unchanged. The ability to gather all those things, and ultimately to get people to follow you, is what truly matters. If you are especially good at it, you won't even need to worry about any plasma containment. After all, every minute that you spend in the lab is a minute you don't spend on changing the world.
Reality does get a vote too though. If you don't want to be the next Elizabeth Holmes, you need to make sure you have actually achievable plans.
Not really; you just need to be better at not getting caught. The majority of the startup industry is built on this principle: you show some flashy demo, get a bunch of funding, get acquired and successfully exit, repeat. Let someone else deal with the mess of your promised AI-driven blockchain biohacking bracelet or whatever, it's not your problem anymore...
As someone in the startup industry, I disagree that the majority of the startup industry is built on this principle. It's just the stuff that gets reported, because that's how media always works
Maybe Holmes' problem wasn't that she was a fraud, it was that she trying to produce a real product which could be proven to not work. If she'd aimed for something vaguer, she wouldn't be in prison.
You can also outsource the charisma, persuasion parts, often the case with technical founder partnering with the biz/marketing guy.
I think it's something like "The world would be great if we were rational -> Some people are stopping rational people from making it great -> I should fight against these people -> (partisan takes)"
You seem to believe we should fight against irrationality purely with rationality, but I think Adams wouldn't have shared your belief. He would believe you need to win by any means, and once the enemies are out of the way, then we can have our good and rational world.
As described, his conclusion bears some similarity to Haidt's in The Righteous Mind -- people's decisions are emotional judgments, merely cloaked in reason. Certainly this allowed him to see Trump's political potential. But Haidt could have told Adams that Adams, no less than anyone else, was prone to letting his emotions drive the intellect that he thought he exalted. And so he went from "Trump has a better shot than you think" to "my new fans like me much more than my old ones, and have a bunch of appealingly contrarian medical advice." Alas.
Once you disagree with the mainstream and become famous for it, you start getting constant social reinforcement to disagree with the mainstream even more. Apparently most people can't resist that pressure.
Which kinda makes it interesting that *you* seem to mostly resist the pressure. My guess is that it helps a lot to have an offline community which knew you before that happened.
I've got a relative or two like that as well. In an era of disheartening things that weird slide from principled libertarian to whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it among people I love and respect has been the most disheartening for me. Gives me "there but for the grace of God go I" type vibes.
If history is written by the winners then we don’t know the truth about anything really.
Is "IT’S JUST A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, YOU FAIL" the quintessential motte-and-bailey?
It's why post trump adams got old very fast. He would claim anything he said was just aimed at persuasion or 4d chess, and would just shrug off any factual errors.
It is very hard to have worthwhile conversations with people like that! In my experience there ends up being a lot of "ends justify the means" type sentiment as well. "That thing he said isn't true!" "Well, sure, not literally true but just having said it has all these positive third-order effects!"
50% Motte & Bailey, 50% Clown Nose On / Clown Nose Off
This was wonderful. Hilarious, engaging, and moving. Loved it.
Dave Barry is still great and on Substack now!
You, sir or madam, may have just made my week.
Thanks for writing this. I'd been feeling a little mixed-up about how to feel about Scott Adams. He was somehow a big part of our lives, I felt, but I knew he had taken a bad rightward turn and fallen from grace (as it were). It reminds me a little of when Michael Jackson died. Anyway, you've helped me (as well as entertained me) with this post.
>“the Supreme Court will overturn the 2024 election”
I mean, they've done it before.
Uh huh.
Really, when?
I assume that's a reference to the 2000 election. Some newspapers later did the count Gore requested and found he still would have lost... but a different method of recounting than he requested would have changed the result.
Notably, the different method of recounting was the one required by law.
Given he didn't ask for that one, I have little sympathy for his loss, but it would be accurate to say that he was illegally deprived of an election victory.
Free market paid out for Gore winning florida.
What are you referring to?
Someone always runs a betting pool for the US election (London's generally good for it, it wasn't legal stateside). They did specific states, as well, bet on whether Gore or GWB would win Florida, say.
We were reading Peanuts books when we were kids. Not all of them, but the one or two that were in the house, because we didn’t buy things then, and the few that were at the branch library.
Some parallels perhaps.
My husband believes you can’t get Dilbert unless you were sitting in a cubicle at a computer in 1995, which he was - but I read him parts of your essay and he liked it.
He’s curious if Jews all know about the Kabbalah and Gentiles just overlooked it all this time (I mean, until fairly recently). He wants to know what’s there. Maybe you’ve done an explainer on that.
Well, knowledge of the kabbalah (or a version of it) is part of the Western esoteric tradition. If you've ever seen the classic "circles on the floor for witchcraft/black magic" in horror movies, the writing around the circumference is derived from (often badly mangled) Hebrew words:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle
Used with pentacles, too (some of the examples in this article make me think of veves in voodoo, which makes me wonder about the derivation of that element in that tradition):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentacle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veve
Western versions tended to call it "cabala" (see Dr. Dee) and "qabalah":
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078295-the-maddeningly-magical-maths-of-john-dee/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Kabbalah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Qabalah
The esoteric tradition as far as I know has no part of American Protestantism unless those labyrinths they have put in in recent decades count.
The most popular deck of Tarot (the Rider-Waite deck) also contains tons of kabbalistic symbols. It's also a fun game I can wholeheartedly recommend.
I used to collect Tarot decks back in the early 2010s so yeah, the classic deck chock-full of symbolism deliberately put in. Fun to play with, but I wouldn't take it seriously as genuine prediction (as a psychological tool, though, can be helpful for starting trains of thought).
Please tell your husband there are dozens of us here who disagree.
We read Dilbert when we were children, we *internalized it*, and then we sat in cubicles at computers in 2005 and 2010 and 2015 and found it was as true as we expected. "Holy crap, it was barely an exaggeration, and apparently it's barely changed in ten or twenty years".
Would your husband not agree that we get it?
Sadly, no, he’s weirdly immune to hyperventilating internet commentary, and the internet generally. Something wrong in his education or upbringing, I guess.
As far as I know, most Jews, certainly most Ashkenazi Jews, don't even know about Kabbalah except from popular culture and haven't studied it.
I learned a little about it from Dion Fortune, a Christian(?) occultist. Some of her book may be accurate, but Tipareth isn't Jesus.
Christian interest in the Kabbalah goes back at least to the Baroque ere.
The Handbook of World Religions, Bertrand Russell, some Bible reading, and a few Learning Company CD sets are pretty much all he knows about religion.
The vast majority of Jews do not know much about kabbalah. In this review, Scott Alexander claims a knowledge of kabbalah that would be extremely rare among Jews, and somewhat rare among knowledgeable Orthodox Jews (to restrict the comparison in two ways). It is hard to believe he has read any significant fraction of the source texts in which these ideas appear, although it is possible that he has read recent academic works which summarize them.
In modern (European) Spanish, "hacer cábalas" is a very commonly used and understood phrase meaning to speculate about future occurences, and also the word "cabal", meaning "exact" or "perfectly fitting." Both derived from "kabbalah".
There was a much loved bookstore called Stacey's Books near PacBell headquarters. I suspect Adams was referring to it when he named his restaurant. I'd gone to one of his book signings there, circa 2001, and he spent the entire time ranting about how white men were a despised, persecuted minority with no chances of career advancement, to a stony reception from the audience. So his rightward lurch long predates Trump.
According to the linked NYT article, the restaurant was founded by a business partner named Stacey. Adams merely took over the management of one location.
It's not as though he was [completely wrong](https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/)
Nearly everything in that article postdates 2001, so he was completely wrong.
For a non-white person, this would be called "lived experience" - it's literally what happened to him, he was blocked in his career advancement because of DEI quotas (fortunately, this is also what made him into a full-time cartoonist instead of a middle-manager who occasionally draws slightly funny pictures). Many other people had the same experience, but their story was never heard of course, because they did not become minor celebrities.
This essay is SSC resurgent. A fantastic tribute.
I too greatly enjoyed Dilbert during my early/pre-teens. And I still do, the strips included in the article are hilarious. I also enjoyed the context this post gave me: I had a habit of reading dilbert.com daily and rarely if ever looked at the associated blog, but when Scott had successfully predicted the rise of Trump, that compelled me to investigate whether he actually had a predictive theory no one else had and initially his arguments even seemed rather convincing. Of course, it increasingly turned out that Trump was not in fact playing 5D Chess as Scott was claiming and instead Scott's claims were becoming increasingly unhinged, and so I started treating Dilbert the same way Dogbert does Tim in the comic, but this post offered some sort of closure and context to this chapter.: I now think he probably DID have a correct (PHB-shaped) theory, and since verifying the validity of rational arguments is "easy" (in P=?NP sort of sense), a lot of damage might have been avoided if people had started listening early, until Scott's ramblings became (likewise verifiably) unhinged.
It's unfortunate that he turned into fascism --- "But S--" "No! If there's twelve people sitting on a table and one is doing nazi salutes and shouting Hitler did nothing wrong at the top of his lungs and the other 11 don't kick the one guy out immediately, then there's 12 nazis sitting on a table" --- but while I haven't followed controversies, the reactions to Scott's passing to me seemed overblown. Was he a rampant sexist? Granted, it's been a decade since I last read Dilbert and of course I may not be woke enough to notice, but I don't recall getting such an impression from reading the comics? On that count I always preferred to give him the benefit of a doubt thinking of him as a nerd with typical nerdy shortcomings when it comes to avoiding any faux pas (the same goes for the characters of Dilbert and Wally insofar as they act inconsiderate), and his eventual turn to the dark side being for the usual kinds of reasons reasonably smart people can be disastrously wrong, rather than malice or deep personal failure. While I don't believe in giving any quarter to real enemies (like fascists) on the political battlefield, it's healthy to occasionally humanize them in personal life and see where they are coming from, and this post as well as Scott's farewell note paint him in a sympathetic light, and I'm grateful for being able to view him this way, thanks to the other Scott for making this possible. Perhaps I will even revisit some of the Dilbert comics (pre-2010 ones at least) rather than letting the taint of association prevent me from having a laugh.
What a great tribute. This essay will stand on its own as a perceptive essay about people like you and Scott Adams and your readership. I'm a little younger than you but one of the first comic collections I owned and read cover to cover repeatedly was Fugitive from the Cubicle Police. I didn't know he had one of those collections where he explained his thought processes behind the comics and his humor, but I devoured similar books by Gary Larson (The Far Side) and Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes).
I often found his claims about hypnosis and such a bit puzzling. I tried to keep an open mind, especially when he was so right about Trump (but not in every way, as you point out). I didn't know he had so many other predictions that were wacky and falsifiable and completely wrong, nor realize the extent to which it was a culmination of his life's work.
His story, your story, and my story (as one of your readers, a disappointed clever nerd, often too clever by half) have many commonalities. This essay blows my mind, really makes me think, and may change my life. But if I take it seriously, I fail.
"His fame turned the All-Seeing Eye of social media upon him, that gaze which no man may meet without consequence."
The same is true of genius. I've had the strange pleasure of meeting a few geniuses in my life, and even working with a few of them. One thing it taught me is the distinction between them and us "merely" smart people. Genius is consuming, a competitive fire that burns bright. And seeing them in their own light, it illuminated for me an unsettling truth; that the jump for those geniuses from "I'm nearly always right, when I and another disagree" and "I'm nearly always right, so someone disagreeing with me is *evidence* they're wrong" is short and easy to make. It's genuinely Greek Heroic Flaw stuff. Genius curdles into arrogance, if not tempered by strong friendships. And being that friend is a lot of work - emotional and otherwise - for those of us with the fleeting and bewildering privilege of being in their orbits.
I'm not calling S. Adams a genius. And I never met him, though like S. Alexander I also read his books with delight as a kid. But watching Adams's descent into madness definitely helped me understand and name this weird thing I had seen. Rest in peace.
I’ve never understood the problem with smart people believing they are (mostly) right on topics of interest to them. They have surely researched those points.
Counterexample: the stereotypical physicist who believe they can reduce everything to physics, so no further research is required.
https://xkcd.com/793/
That's the opposite of "topics interesting to them" though.
They may well have done a little research, but that's not the same thing as really knowing a subject-- and yet they may have a feeling of certainty.
On almost any subject worth having an opinion on, you'll find that there's always an equally smart person on the other side though.
(The worst reaction to this is to try to convince yourself that the people who disagree with you are actually not smart after all.)
You reminded me of an old Scott classic https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/
section II summarising the minimum wage debate.
The trap there is that if you are really smart, often your specific subject comes so easily to you that you've never had to work at it. It's just instinctual knowledge that you look at X and immediately grok "Ah, then Y and Z follow!"
So you get used to "I don't have to do the deep digging those other guys have to do, because they are not as smart as me. I can immediately know if it's X or Y just by a cursory examination".
And that's how we get really smart, genuinely experts on their subjects, straying out of their lanes and making dumb pronouncements on other topics because "this is so easy, I don't have to study it" or even "This doesn't even merit study because it's so stupid on the face of it".
See Terry Eagleton's review of Dawkins' "The God Delusion" all the way from 2006, still an oldie but a goodie:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday."
Does Dawkins need to understand theology to argue against the existence of God. Surely that’s only necessary when talking specific aspects of God.
He needs to know enough not to make the kind of elementary mistakes equivalent to "so if evolution says humans evolved from monkeys, why don't we have tails, huh?" or the ever-favourite "Evolution is only a *theory*, that means it's not real like a *law*".
Adams does a bit of that, too, in "God's Debris" - the kind of "hey, betcha never thought of *this* knock-down argument, huh, believers?" that most have encountered about sixty times over two thousand years. Gosh gee wow, no I nor nobody else never thought of the problem of evil, or divine omniscience versus free will, or why would an infinite being be subject to emotions?
"He continued. “Does it make sense to think of God as wanting anything? A God would have no emotions, no fears, no desires, no curiosity, no hunger. Those are human shortcomings, not something that would be found in an omnipotent God. What then would motivate God?”
Hint: yeah, that's why we say God is impassible, Scott.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impassibility
Part of Dawkins' argument against the existence of God is that certain aspects traditionally associated with God, such as omnipotence or benevolence, are either inconsistent with each other or inconsistent with the observable world.
You don't need to understand theology to argue against the existence of God, but you might need to in order to fill up an entire 600-page book with arguments against the existence of God.
Domain expertise is what is needed to be right on a topic. Being smart makes domain expertise easier to get with the same amount of effort; interest is generally required to acquire domain expertise, since otherwise why spend the effort; but none of that matters if you decide not to spend your brain power on actually learning about the thing. (Which is not quite the same as "research" - all kinds of conspiracists can cite reams of extremely poor data for their conclusions.)
In "The Right Stuff" Wolf pointed out that a fairly serious problem at Edwards AFB was the tendency of highly trained experts in the art of flying experimental aircraft tended to believe they possessed similar expertise in every other possible mode of transportation, leading to a disproportionate number of highway accidents.
According to the book, Yeager broke the sound barrier with a broken arm, having recently fallen from a horse he was riding carelessly.
People like winning. "They told me I couldn't, but I did" is a stock inspirational line, but it's from the same kind of thinking. That competitive disagreement can be - and usually is - healthy, But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions.
One failure mode is if you stake too much on it and are wrong, that can be disastrous. We don't usually hear about them, because they lost and are embarrassed about it, except at r/wsb, but "lost his shirt on the stock market" is a tragically common story.
Another is if you play that competitive game, the poker kind of smart, sometimes you go on runs. If you're smart, that happens a lot. If you're a genius, it's not so much that sometimes you go on runs as occasionally you're *not* on a run. Do that too much and you might carelessly abstract away disagreement as proof that the counterparty is wrong. And most of the time, you'll be right! And have saved time and self-doubt! But you'll often be a jerk and occasionally you'll also be disastrously wrong. You might think that just because you're Andrew Carnegie and you're the titan of steel and oil, you can stop a war. You know, hypothetically! And he legitimately tried and it shattered him. Or you might be a guy who makes rockets and cars and try to make one little submarine. (Hypothetically!) And then you get rejected and it shatters you. You might be a funny and well-liked cartoon-makin' man, and then make a wild prediction and it seems suddenly very plausible. (Hypothetically!) But then all the people at the newspapers who used to look up to you turn against you, and it shatters you.
But in a sense the second case is a lot like the first case. Being called on an emotionally over-leveraged position is less immediately an off-ramp to the game as compared to a financially over-leveraged position, but it can get you nonetheless.
Now looking forward to a similar insightful post-mortem essay when Dave Barry passes.
I was happy that I put up my Scott Adams post explaining how huge of an impact "Dilbert" had c. 1991 -- crazy as it sounds 35 years later, nobody had ever thought to do a funny cartoon about tech workers in cubicles before -- a week or two ago before he died.
Unfortunately as far as I can tell Barry is just a perfectly normal guy without that many weird psychological depths, so I don't know how I'd do that.
Three wives, lead singer of a 1960s rock band, grew up in IBM headquarters town, English major in college during the 1960s, seven years working in corporate America, unbelieving son of a Protestant minister whom he greatly admired, mother died sadly, came to dominate writing humor for white collar corporate frequent fliers the way Adams dominated humor for techies.
There's a fair amount there.
I've found Adams an an important illustrative example on what not to do:
on how to not see the evils of the world and Sour-grapes your way into being a willing collaborator,
on how not to let your achievements in one field run away with you,
on how to not let your self image as a intellectual who stands apart from the masses hide the fact that your main reward circuit is activated by people clapping at you when you do your one trick (either do the trick knowingly, or achieve enlightenment)
on how not to isolate yourself to the point where compassion and empathy start feeling like frivolous weakness.
And on how just because you were bullied, pushed down, and taken advantage of for your talents and tendencies by (SYSTEM), capitalist realism in this case; that doesn't make your every impulse heroic.
It is interesting to see a guy who but for the grace of god/ A||B goes anybody with just a hint of the tism and a rightward direction on the curve.
Unbelievably good post that elevates and redefines the medium. Sometimes it feels like nothing online can mean anything, but this does.
I think the idea that the universe is the result of God killing himself also shows up in German Romanticism, in Philipp Mainländer, though maybe I'm misinterpreting it. Also, along the lines of "killshots," I'm pretty sure Scott coined the phrase 4d chess, right?
Superlative. Thank you Scott.
One of the great things about Scott Adams to me is his early and strong embrace of the internet as a place for social and intellectual life. I think his was the first blog I read, and I read it for years and years. Dilbert was my first email subscription and it outlasted by a decade almost everything else.
this post got tagged in gmail as "Comics" because it got caught by the middle school filter I had set up for my daily dilbert comics.
On Adams' particular flavor of reaction formation, a young, supple mind can balance both defense mechanisms of self-awareness and "I'm better than those nerds"-ness because, when you are in the early stages of your life, you can have awareness of your current flaws, but maintain hope that you will change and somehow prove you are actually better than those nerds at some point in the future. As you grow older and that future never materializes, you now have the evidence that you are not better than those nerds. You can either lean towards self-awareness and accept this reality, or you can lean towards the belief you are better than those nerds but The Universe conspired against you so now you don't have the proof. To form that narrative, you have to give up the self-awareness. Its not that young, supple minds are more capable of holding both of the contradicting defense mechanisms at once, its just that the inevitable crash to reality forces you to pick a side.
That's a good point. Also, enduring success in any respect, even if it's "just a comic," must chafe against one's efforts to be humble.
Yea, it definitely doesn't help! I am sure we all assume our distribution of strengths to be less spiky than they are in reality.
I'm very disappointed about the lack of kabbalistic analysis of the divine/enlightened garbage man who is a periodically-reoccuring minor character in Dilbert.
This is one of the most complex, insightful, and overall just beautiful obituaries I‘ve ever read.
I didn’t care about Scott Adams much. I still don’t, but this gave some valuable context. Thank you.
Really, he didn’t deserve the cancellation or the loathing I’ve seen recently. He was a good cartoonist, and that’s definitely something.
I think he kind of deserved it. I mean, the race stuff was whatever it was, and your opinions on that will be your opinions of every other race-based cancellation, but afterwards he became an extremely typical right-wing pundit who shared basically every flaw of online MAGAism. I choose to remember him for who he was before that happened, and for the parts of him which survived that transition.
That’s all true, but then it’s the cancellation that matters. As you said, that tactic sent people who might have been in the middle running towards whatever side granted a little psychological comfort.
It’s pretty clear who he was, and in any other time period, I doubt he would have been so political.
I don't have much patience for the common excuse of "people were mean to me, so I had no choice but to become a fascist".
He definitely deserved it. It wasn't brought up in this essay, but his defense of Charlottesville is inexcusable. He tried to whitewash it and "hypnotize" people into not remembering that the President was trying to both sides a KKK march where Nazis murdered a nice liberal lady. You simply have to be 100% against those people. If you disagree, then we really don't have anything to talk about.
Then we don’t have anything to talk about
Mark me down as someone you don't want to talk to.
That’s what I thought too until I saw the actual transcript where Trump unprompted specifically says he’s NOT talking about the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who should be totally condemned.
See for yourself. The media typically cut off the second red box in video clips and quotes:
https://imgur.com/a/lgv3IrK
This is exactly my point. Scott Adams ignores the fact that this specific condemnation only came after two previous failed attempts and immense public pressure. Even then, the President immediately undermined his own statement by insisting that blame should be shared by those who were there opposing the white supremacists.
I find the suggestion that the media is somehow lying about Trump's true feelings about his white supremacist supporters ridiculous.
I spent a lot of time in 2015 reading Scott's blog and I found his observation (that people aren't rational, they just work backwards to rationalize their positions) insightful. I think maybe Scott hypnotized himself in this case.
No, Trump made this specific condemnation of the neo-Nazis at the exact same time he made the “both sides” remark. Click the link. It was an unprompted clarification that he was not including them as part of the fine people he was referring to moments earlier.
You can argue that there were people on the right who were not white supremacists or neo-Nazis who were still distasteful and Trump should have done more to distance himself from them. But the hoax is the claim Trump was referring to neo-Nazis as fine people when he actually said the opposite.
My point is that Scott Adams attempts to rewrite history by narrowly focusing on this one specific statement while ignoring the context. This was Trump's third attempt at addressing the events, while under extreme political pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally#President_Trump's_response
Many of these same people later attacked the Capitol on January 6th.
Now they've been federalized and sent to Minneapolis, the origin of the BLM protests in 2020.
It’s fair to say that Trump was unwilling to criticize people who opposed removing Confederate statues. It’s fair to say that he thought some of them were fine people.
It’s not fair to say he thought neo-Nazis and white supremacists were fine people. There is a world of difference. It’s not rewriting history to call attention to the difference.
Even lumping together Charlottesville, Jan 6, and Minnesota is glossing over massive differences.
The fine people hoax was so notorious because most of the country (but perhaps not you) sees a world of difference between defending Confederate statue preservationists and defending neo-Nazis, and the media falsely claimed Trump was defending neo-Nazis.
The latter claim made people literally want to kill Trump.
I think there's also something to be said about the transition from engaging with your fans mostly via e-mail, which even with an address published in every strip requires friction to respond to, to the much lower barrier to entry Social networks we have now. There's a nice pre-2012 internet in the Dilbert Blog (and other stuff like Bill Simmons mailbag columns) which come from only getting feedback from your most thoughtful and engaged fans.
I mostly missed Dilbert as a comic - well aware of it, but never really sat down and read it. (More of a Calvin and Hobbes person, as my avatar suggests...)
And thankfully I mostly don't relate to Dilbert in my work life... but his "Code Mocking" strip is more or less a timeless truth of software engineering to me: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2013-02-24 .
(Also I think about the line "my purpose in life is to transport huge quantities of coffee from the coffee maker to a urinal" - I bet you can find that one on a boomer-style self deprecating coffee mug somewhere)
I stopped buying into "my higher-ups are fools" narrative after I played some multiplayer games with optional cooperation.
In 1v1 games or multiplayer strictly adversarial games, the most competent player wins. But in games like Diplomacy, being known as "competent and likely to win" is a surefire way to get other players to band together and kick you out first. In these situations, being competent is a losing strategy.
So when I see that that people at the top are incompetent, I feel warm inside. It means we're winning.
Being visibly competent is the problem. I have a friend who frequently says--and I'm sure this is common in the Navy and other places--"Your problem is that you showed up on time and demonstrated basic competence. Now everything is your problem and your fault".
It's like how good drug mules don't go speeding down the road at 40 over, but also don't conspicuously follow the letter of every traffic law.
I haven't played Diplomacy, but I think real-life business is less zero-sum than such games. "Likely to win" doesn't actually make you a target for everyone else to bring down.
Real life isn't a multi-player, single-winner game.
And my solo Diplomacy wins came from being recognized as a competent leader of an initially-defensive alliance. If the game didn't include the wholly unrealistic "to be a winner you must now betray all your remaining allies" step, I never would have done so. And even when I was planning to do so and everybody else at least half-suspected I was planning to do so, they needed a competent partner or leader to even survive.
I don't think this is it. In business it's pretty rare to need to defuse alliances - your competitors will always be competing against you. I don't think the fact that Sam Altman is known as a good businessman risks all the other AI companies allying against him in some sense.
In business, defusing alliances is a constant everyday occurrence - internally for middle managers (like Dilbert's boss). A good example is a strong performer like Steven Sinofsky being ousted out by peers at Microsoft, and his leadership stake getting partitioned among his detractors.
If you're a middle manager hunting for a promotion, so are 10 other middle managers on your level. One of the 10 is a star performer. What are your options?
1) Being an even star-er performer head and shoulders above your rival, so that upper management notices you and promotes you and not them.
2) Forming an anti-frontrunner coalition and use various collective tools to oust the star - peer evaluations saying "not a team player", HR reports, convenient process hiccups.
In many cases, option 2 is optimal. It's even more optimal if "coordination" is basically your only performance indicator - common in government work outside business (as I gather from watching Chinese palace dramas).
That being said, I do admit that in the American AI field, the most permissive industry in a highly deregulated nation, the anti-frontrunner dynamics might be less salient than in other contexts.
I haven't played Diplomacy specifically, but this is a thing in other free-for-all strategy games that I have played, like computer fantasy wargame Dominions. That being said, there are ways the player who is "known for being likely to win" can do, like self-handicapping by playing weak factions, meme strategies, focus on roleplay (self-handicapping RP restrictions aside, RP player is more predictable: if they're on an anti-undead crusade, as a non-undead faction you can be pretty sure they're not going to attack you... at least for as long as they continue their RP thing), or merely playing really conservatively rather than exploding out of the gates ("I understand that you all want to kill me for being the known expert player, but as your scouting has likely revealed, I had a really bad starting position giving me only 15 provinces, while this other guy is at immediate risk of snowballing to victory at 30 provinces, maybe we should be allies instead") and trying to stay in the running, and so long as they stay in the contention and other players keep dropping off contention, eventually there will be two players in the contention and then they can outplay and win. The best players don't necessarily or even often win (matches often have 10+ players so positive winrate would be rather special, especially when playing with closer peers), but their win rates are nevertheless much higher than average in spite of this emergent "autobalancing" mechanic.
Reading Scott Alexander on Scott Adams made something uncomfortable click for me.
Adams didn’t fail because he was stupid. He failed because a very successful internal world model quietly became self-sealing.
What hit me was realizing that I’m squarely in the same risk group —
above-average intelligence, decades of model-building, many past hits, and fewer hard penalties for being wrong outside my core domain.
So instead of moralizing, I asked a very pragmatic question:
How do you keep this from happening to yourself?
The countermeasure ChatGPT asked me to experiment with is deliberately simple:
When I feel the “this is obvious / they have no idea” reflex, I force myself to write down:
- What exact mechanism the other side believes is at work
- What incentives could explain why that story exists
- What assumption I am silently making that could be wrong
Then one key check:
- What observation would actually force me to revise my model?
If I can’t name one, that’s the red flag.
Hybris isn’t thinking you’re right.
It’s losing the habit of specifying how you could be wrong.
Adams didn’t lose intelligence.
He lost an update path.
This is a helpful strategy. But you should also make sure you don’t become too reliant on one ai system!
I was gonna say, the irony here is strong - turning to a self-curated artificial interlocutor to avoid “self-sealing”!
you got me ;-)
To be clear I think the advice in this case was actually pretty good. The last “key check” is actually the “crux” of the debate, something Scott has written about.
Funny, I also read Dilbert and Dave Barry obsessively for those years and can’t make a joke to save my life. I can relate heavily to a nerd that sucked at talking to humans and then tried to use my IQ to become a master persuader. I was actually able to do this well enough to become a pointy-haired boss of HR of all fields. I was unaware of all of his books, and find myself curious on his ones on persuasion. I truly will miss him.
"He was one of the first people to point out the classic Trump overreach, where he’ll say something like “Sleepy Joe Biden let in twenty trillion illegal immigrants!” The liberal media would take the bait and say “FACT CHECK: False! - Joe Biden only let in five million illegal immigrants!”, and thousands of people who had never previously been exposed to any narrative-threatening information would think “Wait, Joe Biden let in five million illegal immigrants?!”"
This. So many times. People don't talk enough about how successful this is for him. Even when there's just an out of context grain of truth.
"Haitians in Ohio are eating our pets"
"Fact check: False"
"Here's a video with no other context of a black guy who said he ate dog meat once. THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS LYING TO YOU!"
I'd be lying if I said I never was surprised by what was actually going on after a Trump exaggeration. I'm happy for things like the immigration example to work for him - I think the actual number of people illegally living here genuinely surprised people, even if it was often not as many as he said.
What annoys me is the times where he makes a statement that is complete BS, and his supporters keep retreating until they finally find something that he clearly didn't originally mean and claim everyone else has TDS - like the Haitians eating dogs example.
Can you recite chapter and verse about the Haitians eating cats? (This is an actual cultural concept in Haiti, related to a holiday). And why that was a good thing to say?
Trump's persona is a lot smarter than people think.
I don't know much about Haiti, but I do know that despite weeks of trying, nobody ever turned up any evidence of any Haitian in that town eating a single cat, much less an epidemic of it. But yes, as I said his persona is very effective.
There's a reason Trump chose the Haitians. In the pecking order of Caribbean nations, they're at the bottom. Other Caribbean peoples look down on them, feel they are inferior.
It's not the only reason to say "Haitians are eating cats and dogs" but it is an astute reason.
In that case of Ohio, Trump/Vance were able to manipulate the media to widely broadcast the message that heartland Ohio towns were now inhabited by large Haitian populations. That core message of "alien invasion!" is enough to terrify white heartland voters across the country. It doesn't matter a whit if the Haitians in reality are law abiding, hard working and good neighbors, my white rural New Hampshire neighbors don't want them moving in. By getting the media and liberals to push back on the "eating cats and dogs" slander, Vance actually manipulated minds just as Adams would have suggested.
Yes exactly. Now that I know to look for it, I can usually avoid playing into it when talking to my republican family members, but just have to shake my head as the MSM steps on the rake over and over.
Pat Buchanan used to have those kind of sessions with Richard Nixon while writing speeches for Nixon in 1966: Pat would write, "And an audit of the XYZ program found that 82% of your taxpayer dollars were wasted!" But Nixon would read it as "And an audit found that 91% of your taxpayer dollars were wasted."
Buchanan asked Nixon why he was always misread stats like that. He said because that way the local newspaper would cover his speech on two different days: tomorrow they'd quote me saying 91% wasted and then the next day they'd issue a correction saying only 82% of your taxpayer dollars were wasted. So twice as many people will learn that the XYZ program is a big waste of their money.
That's really interesting. Well fair enough I guess. It's the media's job to correct it, but democrats have to be smarter about balancing correcting lies and increasing salience.
I, too, grew up on Dilbert and Dave Barry as a 10-year old. Really great piece today.
My daughter brought home a children's novel the other day that had "Dave Barry" listed as an author. I thought "well that's probably a common name, couldn't possibly be the same guy". It was!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_the_Starcatchers
The "I can't complain" joke didn't start with the refuseniks. It's at least as old as the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.
I learned of you through Scott. Think a lot of what you say is valid but have to admit I’m one of the people whose lives he changed for the better. When I first listened I was a 25 year old 3x college dropout and 10 years later I have a great career and family. A lot of that comes from applying his advice. Subjectively I’ll always love him because of what he gave me, without even knowing who I am.
Can you explain more about what parts of his work helped you, and how?
Mostly the reframes and micro lessons. Almost everyday at work or home there’s a situation where one pops into my head.
“I’m not anxious, I’m excited”
“laziness is caused by thinking about the cost instead of the pay off”
“systems are better than goals”
The main idea, that by changing my thoughts I can change my reality, is simple but went a long way for me. It opened up my imagination to what’s possible and made my thinking more positive.
Very tangential to the topic, but reacting to the idea that you can help people by teaching them the social manipulation skills that actually make people successful: The problem with this is that it's an arms race, and once those skills become common they no longer produce success. They just make the world worse, forever.
Perhaps for some but other techniques work because they take advantage of how humans are wired, so they simply represent better, more memorable communication.
For example, the persuasion power of an abstract concept like “border security” is less than that of a concrete visualization like “building a wall”.
Right, but what I'm saying is that if everyone trying to persuade you to different sides of an argument is using non-persuasive language, there is room for you to consider the actual merits instead.
Whereas if (ad absurdum) everyone on every side is using super-advanced brain-hacking mind-control language or w/e, then your decision is mostly determined by who you listen to first, not any particular merit of any particular decision.
Persuasion is inherently a bias introduced on top of a decision process. You can be in favor of persuasion towards what you consider good things, but once that technique becomes universal and the other side has it, it no longer produces more good things. It's just a stochastic force pushing decisions that is unrelated to the quality of different choices.
Scott Adams talked about this specifically and dubbed it "the Documentary Effect". He observed that just about every documentary will be persuasive because it shows the arguments for one side in such a more powerful way than the other, and thus you can't believe any documentary until you've also seen one arguing the opposite.
In general, I'd prefer to see both sides of an argument make the most persuasive case they can and I view that as a positive end state rather than an arms race to the bottom.
Great article, Scott A.
I didn't read Dilbert as a kid because I was 22 when it started.
I followed Adams' blog for a time during the Stacey's thing. He had a fair amount of the crazy even then, and eventually I found the value overwhelmed by highly confident nonsensical assertions.
He would say things untethered to reality, like, "I could never be on a jury because all prosecutors understand hypnotism and they would not let a hypnotist on a jury." (this is from memory, may not be an exact quote.) This not a particularly long sentence to be wrong in a lot of ways.
Aside: I think the Dilbert TV series was good-ish.
The show was ok, but I don’t know, animating it didn’t really add anything to the strips. It did however give us the clip about “the knack”, which I share pretty frequently.
Maybe a looser live action adaptation would have played well at the peak of The Office / Parks and Rec?
"Can he live a normal life?"
"No. He'll be an engineer."
>a looser live action adaptation
You mean The Drew Carey Show?
The trick Adams' built the last years of his life around is a mental privilege escalation exploit of the form "I can take over your brain. You find that statement ridiculous and annoying, so now you're thinking about me - I win! Oh no, was that statement even more obnoxious? Because now there's A Controversy, and that means..."
This trick is only as effective as we collectively allow it to be, and can in theory be easily defeated by simply ignoring the speaker. To this end, and to discourage the proliferation of low-level memetic vandalism, I have nothing else to say on the subject of Scott Adams.
This is a great post. I never really followed him beyond stumbling across the odd Dilbert strip years ago, then listening to him steelman Trump on Sam Harris's podcast in ~2016 (and thinking the clown genius stuff was pretty damn insightful for the time), then finally being vaguely aware of the recent controversy. But now I'm going to acquire those original books and make some time to read a bunch of Dilbert.
I think I read all of the annotated Dilbert books I could get my hands on during elementary school (my family was poor so I could only read what I could find in libraries). This is probably a formative element in my humor.
The other formative element was that I tried reading all the lists of jokes I could find online and ~memorizing them. Obviously it didn't do much for things like timing, delivery, etc, but I learned a lot about the structure of jokes, and attuned my own sense of which jokes are clever/original/funny by loading all of it into my training data.
Dilbert was real and the reason his red tie is flapping in the breeze is revealed in this photo of the recovery of the NASA Gemini XII crew, Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Gemini_12_recovery.jpg
Great essay.
Several years ago, I started reading his strip every day, and read How to fail at almost everything and still win big, which I loved.
I found him so insightful, that when he started to show great admiration and support for Trump, I became very confused.
For several months, I had a shred of hope that maybe, given his interest in the art of persuasion, it was all a very ambitious social experiment of persuasion - he would show how he could persuade thousands of people that Trump, one of the most erratic and unlikable political candidates ever, was actually a genius.
And after the elections, he would go "ah! see, I persuaded thousands of people to genuinely hold the position that Trump is competent and a genius, so there you go, techniques of persuasion can be incredibly powerful."
Well, that didn't happen and he would only increase repetitive (and unpersuasive) Trump related output.
Sadly, I just stopped following him.
Much like you, I kept thinking of him in a somewhat bittersweet way.
The man sure was funny and had some great ideas. RIP 🙏
expertolatry?
Idolatry of experts
Ken White is still worth listening to on the Serious Trouble podcast with Josh Barro, I just choose to believe his Twitter/Bluesky is run by a different person (or partition of his brain)
Thanks for this, Scott.
There's a special kind of sadness watching your heroes stumble and I've felt it a lot lately. "How do I keep the current epistemic environment from driving me crazy?" is one of the great problems of our time.
"One, the world’s greatest comic writer"
Really?
Don't get me wrong, he was vaguely funny in the 90s. But, even just among cartoonists who were recently alive, compare him to someone world-class, like Quino, say.
After having read this essay, I'm absolutely thrilled that I'm still convinced of my own specialness.
It seems to me that if you’re going to describe his cancellation, you should also relate his personal experience of racial discrimination.
https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1862864391936569835
I suspect it had a lot to do with him going crazy, too. He was probably radicalized when it first happened, but kept quiet for fear of the consequences. After the cancellation, he had nothing left to lose.
For someone who was so in tune with office culture most of the time, I'm suprised Adams didn't see this for what it was.
In his books, he brags about how he was bad at his job, and got promoted because people liked him and he was funny. In the same book he then talks about how he stopped getting promoted due to the diversity ceiling.
Anyone in office culture knows that a manager will give you any reason to soften the blow of being passed over. Adams admits he was bad at the job. Managers probably just didn't want to tell him he wasn't qualified since they like him. Much easier to blame it on something else.
It's hard to know where reality lies. And "actually, race and gender discrimination was the socially acceptable excuse" could also be kind of radicalizing.
Either way, it became an important part of the story he told about himself & I didn't think the eulogy would be complete without it.
I don't deny this happened or is a real issue in society, just that Adams' case is likely an example of the handicap parking spot fallacy.
Adams also had that special kind of narcissism that allowed the gymnastics to claim both that he got promoted despite being bad at his job, but when he wasn't promoted, it was for a different reason.
That sounds like the least special type of narcissism there is.
This. Even if Scott Adams was actually passed over for promotion because of his bad performance, the fact that his bosses told him he was passed over for his race and gender means discriminating against white males in the workplace is completely acceptable. Why shouldn't that be radicalizing? Why should white men just accept such bigotry lying down?
Bingo. I remember during Biden I was removed from a hiring panel after HR noticed "there were too many white men on it". They didn't even pretend I wasn't being removed simply because of my race and gender. And I remember when I filed an EEO complaint the answer came back "just you, not all white men, hence legal".
I'm not in favor of affirmative action, but "white guy who is bad at his job keeps getting promoted despite incompetence because white guy managers like him and find him funny" is not a great argument against it.
I wonder if his earlier promotions were radicalizing to anyone else?
If he really got promoted because he was funny, and his boss sees no problem with openly declaring bias against white men, why wouldn't a black guy who's funny have been promoted? If someone wants to start a anti-promoting-funny-but-incompetent-people crusade, count me in.
I just find it aggravating when people confuse 'racism exists' with 'racism is personally applicable in this particular circumstance'.
I don't think this is a case of projecting racism when in reality, they just don't like you personally which I agree is 99% of workforce EEO complaints. From the OP, they stated his boss explicitly told him it was because of his race and gender, the same as my boss. In a modern litigation aware environment, no boss would be that overt unless it was acceptable and true rather than just saying "sorry, you didn't get the gig, the faceless panel thought Laquanda was a better fit. Next time maybe".
>I don't think this is a case of projecting racism
So it seems we have 2 separate points.
(1) Adams was passed over for performance reasons, but told it was due to affirmative action (this is not saying affirmative action is good or bad, only claiming that it was used as an excuse to avoid a harder conversation with an employee)
(2) Adams was the best person for the job, and was only passed over due to affirmative action.
The OP was claiming (1), that (1) is still radicalizing, (even if you accept the handicap parking spot fallacy is indeed a fallacy, it still causes real emotions and perceptions among people). So in response to OP, I think my response holds.
Your claim I think is different, claim (2)? I find that hard to believe given the self admission of how bad he was and how little he worked. If he had been working his tail off and doing great, I might believe it, but he was not. As for the office politics, in my anecdotal experience, it is much easier for managers to make up reasons they think will keep people happy.
That doesn't soften the blow, it makes it worse. That's the absolute last thing any manager would tell you if it wasn't true.
> Adams and Elon Musk occasionally talked about each other - usually to defend one another against media criticism of their respective racist rants
I claim this is a false accusation. Can you provide one example of such a racist rant. And I don't count some out of context quote from some worthless progressive journalist who called it racist. You of all people should know not to believe a word of that garbage.
The main one that Adams got cancelled for was him saying things like "white people should get the fuck away from black people . . . just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, get away".
He was responding to a poll that suggested that ~50% of black people didn't agree with the statement "It's OK to be white" and his advice was based on the idea that you simply shouldn't associate with people who don't accept you, and not on any deeper notions of racial superiority/inferiority. If he was racist, given he podcasted maybe half a year worth of discussion, there would be much more than that singular statement. And in that statement, if the races were reversed, he would have given the same advice, given my understanding of his position. Finally, it was his normal brand of hyperbole echoed in other less-controversial topics, and occurred around the time I estimate he learned he had serious/probably terminal cancer.
Arguing that Scott Adams was justified in his rant is not the same thing as arguing that it never happened, as the OP claimed.
"Rant" is a pretty loaded term here. "Evidence-based assertion" would be closer to neutral. "Irrefutable advice" would be loaded in the opposite direction.
Jesus, dude.
You obfuscate in an attempt to dodge the point by claiming my argument is that "it never happened." If by "it" you mean the thing that all the worthless journalists called a racist rant, then clearly it did happen. If by "it" you mean a racist rant, then yes, it never happened because it was not racist and also not a rant.
Did you ever see the whole thing? Because that's just the same sentence all the journalists pulled out, so not sure if you came to the same conclusion as them after seeing the whole thing or just read that somewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSMhg6udxn4
I dispute that this is racist, and I also dispute that it is a rant.
Can you say what you think racism is? To me it is very obvious that that video is a display of racism, since he is advocating for prejudice against an entire group based on skin colour.
I think you have a fine leg to stand on about the word "rant" since he delivers it fairly calmly and coherently. It's not really the important part though.
Do you believe racism is a real concept or not? Because if you do, then saying "stay the fuck away" from a singular race is textbook racism, and if it's not then nothing is.
If you ignore the fact that he was saying "stay the fuck" away because of how racist they are against you, then yes. But you don't want to address the obvious racism in that poll he cited and instead want to take 3 words he said completely out of context because that context is devastating to your point.
Even with the most charitable interpretation, both parties are being racist.
Great obituary, and no doubt far better than anything we will read about Scott Adams in the MSM.
I had no idea of Scott's serious philosophical wrangling, and always rather assumed that his supposedly self help books were merely vehicles for his unfailingly funny and wry cartoons.
I also thought I had a fairly complete collection of his books, bought over quite a few years from the 1980s, but now it's clear there must be many later ones I've never seen.
Dear Scott, I have read SSC and ACX for many years, and I wonder whether this was your first post that was not kind.
I understand that this is a very exceptional post because Scott Adams was special to you. But there has always been one trait of you that has inspired true awe in me, and that is your endless kindness. Please don't make it a habit to let that slip.
I am not sure why you think the post was unkind. It was thoughtful and thorough far beyond the norm. In fact, it was the kind of tribute which only a thoughtful writer can pay to another, involving the entire histories of both, in cultural context. It was loving, in the best sense.
Hm, I did notice that other commenters here also did not find it unkind.
Perhaps I am missing the cultural context. I knew Scott Adams for his comics and nothing more. Until yesterday I did not know that he was involved in any culture wars or politics, or got cancelled, or wrote anything else than comics. I guess that US readers will know this context, and this apparently changes things.
From my outside view, I still find it hard to read the post as anything else than unkind, except the last section, which is more conciliatory. Scott Alexander does not conceal that he finds Scott Adams' books plainly dumb, that he thinks Scott Adams has gone totally off rail, even become delusional, and that he is essentially a failed existence. This is a very harsh verdict about a person. Even if true, it is certainly not kind. Probably this has all been the common verdict of the readership even before the post, but for me this is a pretty shocking damnation of the life of a person. And the language "racist rants", "These paragraphs cured me of my misgivings", "cringiest way possible", "second-worst introduction" doesn't do anything to soften the blow.
But I accept that I probably perceive the article very differently from how it was supposed to, because I lack shared background.
All good, thank you for the civil and, dare I say, rational disagreement.
I felt a bit like that too while reading those parts.
It’s true and necessary. To ignore his controversial turn into politics would be Pollyannish, to ignore that his books were increasingly crankish would be hagiography.
And given the tone of other obits of the man, this one is extremely kind, relatively speaking!
Something shared by 50% of the population is definitionally controversial. And the fact that he was dropped by many papers for being controversial is, well, a fact, regardless of my personal feelings on the fairness of the matter.
My opinion of his non-comics writing as “crankish” is nonpartisan - I felt that way well before his 2016 MAGA turn.
I didn't find it necessary. If anything, I would expect a community such as this to have a bit more epistemic humility toward a radical free-thinker. Certainly moreso than to describe his writings as "crankish".
I mean he has a whole thing on “affirmations” that is basically “The Secret: For Men”. Then the “master persuader” stuff. It all has this dynamic that extends from the “thought experiments” Alexander described well, this sort of “I’m not saying this is literally magic obviously that’s silly (but it’s magic)”.
It’s absolutely pseudoscience (at the very least in the sense that he didn’t generally arrive at these conclusions scientifically) and it’s absolutely “crankish” in the sense that the man was extremely dedicated to developing and promulgating some eccentric pseudoscientific/pseudoreligious theories. “Crank” is the most cromulent English word for the career of the non-cartoonist Scott Adams. I think it would go a bit beyond “epistemic humility” to allow the possibility that Adams really had it all figured out and was basically correct in all or most of what he wrote.
And I say that with a fair degree of affection for the man for many of the same reasons Scott lays out in this piece.
I guess I'd have gone with the term "unorthodox", but maybe I have a more negative connotation of "crank" than most.
I thought this post was exceptionally kind. It was much kinder than I was expecting, given the subject matter.
I liked the deathbed conversion joke
> I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school.
First of all, I personally can attest that at least one other elementary-school kid voraciously read those books of syndicated Dilbert strips clearly written and illustrated for not our age-group. And funnily enough (I regret how I failed to learn the art of humor from them), Dave Barry's books also impacted significantly my childhood intellectual development; while Barry brought a dim awareness of the demands of adult life to child-me, the Dilbert comic books came to presage for me the drama to be found in office work. That the role specifically of an engineer demanded not only deep understanding of complex technologies, but also skill in navigating absurd corporate hierarchies and the mundane esoterica of business decision-making systems. Adult me might not have sought work as an engineer if not for Adam's comic visions of the brilliant yet detached technologist who manages to make a life out of navigating the intimidating halls of the office building so often shown in the third-panel establishing shot.
But what I can't stop thinking about is Adams' dead-man-switch final tweet, assuring everyone he had accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior on the basis of Pascal's Wager. He didn't consider his books or his art adequate as a legacy; he needed to be identified as a Christian. And I think about this risk calculus in the context of his glorification of corporate life.
The value prop of the office job is that it holds less risk than starting one's own company or than determining to achieve success as a creative. Corporate work is the safe path. So too, is the deathbed conversion to Christianity. Are the claims of Christianity-- that Jesus is the only way (and so on)-- ontologically true? In the knowledge-vacuum of normal life, what's the safe bet? It reminds me of this Sam Altman quote that most people are really bad at measuring risk and move far too conservatively and should take more risks in life.
If you're about to die, isn't it kind of a ballsy move to say: "I did what I did, I lived the life that I lived. Oh well, it is what it is."?
What if you die, and everything's actually fine. Just about everyone essentially gets to "move on," regardless of which religious beliefs they espoused or didn't. Assuming you can know anything after death, that'd be a really interesting secret to know about, right? But you can't really have 100% confidence that that's the case unless you *didn't* make the deathbed confession. A real risky move, might be. But, if you convert to Christianity while dying, you might "move on" always thinking, gosh that deathbed conversion must have been a really good call on my part because now I get this nice afterlife. Was it the conversion? There wouldn't be a solid way to know for sure without some level of spiritual risk.
So in some way, Scott Adams' died the way he lived: promoting an aversion to risk.
He took risks when he made those failed ventures into food.
This is a strange comment, perhaps, but I am struck, reading your post, by some peculiarities in your style, peculiarities I thought were my own. In the first sentence of not-being-quoted text, for example, the placement of "voraciously read" and the placement and construction of the final bit, "clearly written and illustrated for not our age-group," both leap out to me, not just as things I may have written, but as symptomatic of a style I am increasingly trying, as I mature, to lose. Later on, the sentence which beings "That the role..." and which contains "not only," also strikes. I can keep providing examples, but I worry so to do would risk obscuring my point, which is that your writing strikes me syntactically as more similar to my own than most writing I in the wild encounter. I have several questions for you, any replies to which I ask you either offer in this thread or send to my email [wertionworld [at] gmail [dot] com], because I have blocked, for anti-distraction purposes, most substack domains, and so am unable either my substack Messages or your Captive Liberty to view.
Questions:
1. By whom has your prose style most, in your estimation, been influenced?
2. How does this style, for you, feel to write?
3. How did you arrive at this prose style?
4. Do you feel you are able, when you want, to turn this style off? If so, how do you do this?
5. Are you neurotypical?
Hi Cauliflower, I'm not answering every question because some of what you asked is already answered on my blog. Stylistic influence comes from those whom you spend time reading, and especially reading closely. If you unblock my domain `captiveliberty.substack.com`, you'll see who those writers are for me.
Probably the biggest choice in writing is whether to spend more time or less time editing and improving one's prose before hitting "send". Another choice comes from which writers to read and (therefore) to emulate. As human beings, we learn to communicate through imitation, and that includes writing. The more we read, and the more diverse the source works we read, the more choices appear to us.
Many Thanks for the eulogy for Scott Adams! He will be missed!
There was a meme a while ago about the "Former Gifted Kid" - something like "We never stopped to ask who the gift was from. Turns out, it was the fae." It explains a lot about the world.
I've often wondered... are you the Scott Alexander who wrote all the text adventures?
The text adventure author was actually Scott Adams, not Alexander. (And yes, it was a different Scott Adams, not the guy who's the subject of this post)
Ah, right. Well in my defense, I was 12 when I was playing those.
Ha! That's funny, I totally just thought that you were making a joke.
Incidentally, Scott Adams the game designer is a pretty interesting guy in his own right. He was pretty influential in making games that average people could actually play on the early, cheaper computer models, at the time when the better computers cost as much as a car and they were very difficult to use. I wonder how many people learned about computers and programming by starting off with his games? He's also very much alive and still making games, so I wonder if he sometimes gets annoyed that people are perpetually confusing him with "that other Scott Adams."
“I wonder how many people learned about computers and programming by starting off with his games?”
Arguably, I'm in IT because of them.
Somebody really needs to write The Guide to Scott As for Dummies
> In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer.
I don't believe that trying ivermectin to treat terminal cancer says anything about whether he was a true believer. He tried it (among other things), said it didn't work, and moved on. In the same situation, I'd be more than willing to try low-risk options like ivermectin or even acupuncture, à la Steve Jobs. He was simply hedging his bets, much like he did with his deathbed conversion.
That's exactly my thoughts. People who write that Scott naively believed that ivermectin can treat cancer, probably just show their negative bias. They quote statistics that prostate cancer survival is 100% (5 year) but omit the fact that Scott was diagnosed with stage 4 which has only 50% chance and his cancer has spread to the bones that is even worse.
More interesting would be to ask why he got diagnosed so late? He was unlikely avoiding doctors or not caring about his health. I can only speculate but maybe it was because during covid pandemic access to non-emergency healthcare was limited.
At least in the UK people have higher mortality now than before pandemic, not related to covid. Reasons are not entirely clear but missed diagnoses during covid time are often mentioned as one of the reasons. Sadly, no politician wanted to hear about this when making decisions about lockdowns (except in Sweden).
There's been more than one study out showing that the covid19 vaccines have a correlation with increases in cancer severity. I didn't look up the last one, because it was being DDOSed at the time. (The prior one was a population study in South Korea).
"I don't believe that trying ivermectin to treat terminal cancer says anything about whether he was a true believer."
It's certainly an indication he had bizarre beliefs about the medical establishment and are almost certainly a crank conspiracist.
"try low-risk options like ivermectin or even acupuncture, à la Steve Jobs"
It's pretty well known the Steve Jobs' delay in getting real treatment probably killed him.
From what I heard, he didn't try ivermectin until his regular doctors told him his case was hopeless, at which point he was willing to try unconventional things with small probabilities of success.
I agree with what you are saying and I am replying because I find it shameful that such comments are made about ivermectin being tried (solely) as insane without any one of us knowing what he also tried prior to becoming hopeless. I will reverse course on this if anyone actually knows his treatment plan end to end. Thankfully, most people who are withering away with no clear good options left don't care about being called stupid by internet.
Actually we don't know much with sufficient certainty about Steve Jobs medical case, what were his initial prognosis, what treatments he took and in what order.
Widely known ≠ what actually happened.
Person's health is highly sensitive topic and most people avoid disclosing full medical history in public. Terminal cancer patients try alternative treatments in conjunction with regular therapies quite often.
“Isaacson’s Account: Isaacson wrote that by the time of the 2004 surgery, the cancer "had spread to the tissues surrounding the pancreas." He noted that Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell, and his doctors had pleaded with him to have the surgery earlier, fearing exactly this outcome”
There are roughly infinity low-risk options for treating cancer. In particular, a quick google suggests that there are at least 20.000 FDA-approved drugs on the market, so if your standard is "It's got to be a *real medicine* even if it's not approved for *this*", then 99.995% chance you're going to pick a drug that's not ivermectin.
Unless you're a true believer, MAGA subtribe, in which case it's going to be ivermectin.
I don't believe that there are 20 000 FDA approved drugs to treat metastatic prostate cancer. Not even as an approximate number.
Ivermectin is not a drug approved by the FDA to treat metastatic prostate cancer.
The only reason anyone would take a drug like Ivermectin to treat metastatic prostate cancer is if they thought taking a drug approved for a completely different purpose might coincidentally treat metastatic prostate cancer. This isn't completely silly; one of the things actual medical researchers frequently do is test lots of other drugs to see if they might work - if they do, then they've already been tested for safety, we know what the side effects are, and there's production infrastructure in place. Ideally, they don't make the selection *completely* at random, and they start with tissue cultures or animal models, but with something like e.g. COVID, there's a whole lot of "we're in a desperate hurry, let's throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks". And Scott Adams was in a desperate hurry.
But he wasn't going to take 20,000 different drugs just to see what happened. The only reason anyone would take Ivermectin *specifically* to treat prostate cancer, is either they guessed randomly that that one drug out of twenty thousand would do the trick, or someone they trusted told them "this is the one drug that will do the trick".
And pretty much the only place anyone was being told "Ivermectin is the one drug that will do the trick", for anything but worm infestation, is in the right-wing alternate-media bubble.
... worm infestation. Really.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7564151/
8 years worth of research prior to 2020 on it being a potent antiviral in vitro.
(Now, yes, we all know that not all drugs that work in vitro work in vivo.)
Citing above paper so you can read about the mechanisms, because science is fun!
I mean, I'm not part of the MAGA subtribe, but if I had terminal cancer and all the doctors say my case is hopeless, I'd try ivermectin too. Will it work? Almost certainly not, but what do I have to lose? Maybe the MAGA subtribe is right! Who knows, maybe it'll get rid of the worm infestation I didn't know I had and decrease my suffering by 1%.
Just because he tried something recommended by the MAGA subtribe in a desperate Hail Mary attempt to not die, doesn't mean he was a true believer.
Why Ivermectin, and not one of the many, many other "alternative" cancer treatments being peddled?
Ivermectin is safer than tylenol! For god's sake, they give it to 10% of the world's population, most of which is illiterate!
https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/new-study-ivermectin-shows-striking-anticancer-potential-and-remarkable-safety/
2024, mind you, so a doctor on the "bleeding edge" might have a reason to prescribe it. Ivermectin is amazingly safe compared to most anti-cancer drugs.
I'll try these too. I have to start somewhere, so might as well start with a drug I've heard of and that I know is safe.
That was my thought too. The medical system has given up, what do you have to lose?
I seem to recall Steve Jobs treated his cancer with new age woo. Well, it was the same situation for him, I take it.
A drug I've heard of is more likely to cure cancer than one I have not heard of.
This post produced a feeling of euphoric enlightenment in me
Beautiful.
"the Dilbert comic where Dilbert gets in trouble for putting a comic on his cubicle wall"
Does anyone have a link to that one?
Back in 2000 I was in charge of a startup's small marketing team. One of my employees had met a friend of Scott Adam's at a party. My employee told me that Scott is looking for a startup that would be OK hiring him so he could write with more insight about the startup world. (This was after he had left PacBell and was hanging around at home.) My immediate first reaction was, "Hey, that would be cool." About 15 seconds later I realized I would become literally the PHB. I declined enthusiastically.
As a chronic sufferer of TDS I've fallen into the "the friend of my enemy is my enemy," and long stopped having any respect for this other Scott A. The post did a great job of contextualizing a complicated and intelligent man's life and ideas.
That was meant to be somewhat toungue in cheek. I am vehemently opposed to many of his policies (especially the antidemocratic tendencies and his war on a clean energy transition), but don't really consider anyone an enemy. Everyone has a limited perspective highly influenced by their social context, including myself.
If you're wondering about the deleted comment, it was basically someone shaming me for admitting to TDS :) I really feel that there are people who fail to see they're in a cult on either side. I think there are some like that on the left, but when someone I expect to be rational like Adams is unable to see the huge flaws in someone like Trump, I tend to leap to the conclusion that they're not as rational as I had thought. I'm really glad our Scott took the time to bring out the nuance in Adams' thinking over time.
I was expecting the "I hate Mondays" song link would point to The Boomtown Rats.
Maybe Garfield doesn't fit the school shooter stereotype.
"I Don't Like Mondays" is a better song than "I Hate Mondays."
But not as good as Friday, Friday
How about Monday, Monday?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h81Ojd3d2rY&list=RDh81Ojd3d2rY&start_radio=1
i love you
>God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit they’re nothing special.
This may or may not hit uncomfortably close to home.
For me, finding out I was nothing special was a relief. Now it's someone else's responsibility to be the sane one and save the world.
I find that the quotes of his books are not nearly as bad as you seem to think they are. Maybe this means you'd find me close to an 19-year-old in philosophical depth, but I suspect the majority of the population is relatively shallow philosophically, regardless of age, which would make the "19-year-old" label inaccurate.
I found Scott Adams objectionable due to his resentment for other humans, not because of his low-quality philosophy and hypnotism.
For instance, even on Jan 9, a few days before he died, he comments "Interesting" on a tweet about how many people are just like LLMs, without a world model, and therefore we should take the vote away from them. (https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/2009804196359663713) He held these sorts of beliefs to the end.
His final statement emphasizes to "be useful", and I believe he felt many people to be useless, and feared being useless himself. Perhaps the best lesson one might take from his life is to avoid this trap. He hated that he wasn't as useful as he felt he could have been, and blamed the world for it. If he stopped putting so much value on being "useful", he likely would have lived far more happily.
He doesn't seem to have hated his lack of usefulness, rather his last message expresses happiness at how useful he was.
He did write that he had an "amazing life", and you can believe he felt genuinely happy. But resentment flowed thickly throughout his social media, and I don't believe this is the product of contentment.
Lots of people are negative on social media, that doesn't seem all that informative regarding his last message.
Love this, as I also have many crazy favorites (myself among them). But the mediocrity thing is one I can’t help but correct and as it relates to Adams actual thinking I think it’s worth raising.
Yes you will find someone who is better than you at every single possible thing you do if you get down to the specifics. Mostly anyway. But nobody will have your specific stack or motivations, which is another way of saying nobody will be better at being you. And you’ve got to make the best of what you’ve got.
It’s not that none of us are special, it’s that all of us are and that’s not untrue just because the inverse happens to be depressing and the straightforward version is on Sesame Street and repeated to children.
I loved this essay. It felt like something out of 'Speaker for the dead', an Eulogy that did not shy away from a persons very real flaws, but still written by someone who took the time to actually understand someone and had a real affection for them.
I too read a LOT of Dilbert when I was a kid too. I was many years out from actually experiencing a cubicle back then. But something about Dilbert, a smart, nerdy adult living in a world he didn't fully understand and didn't understand him, spoke to me as a smart nerdy kid in school.
I didn't read much of his later work and also felt he went down kind of a dark path later in life. His comics brought me a lot of happiness early on.
>> Even the word “sidhe” is tabooed and replaced with the euphemism “the fair folk” (from which we get modern “fairy”).
(Quoted from the Shaver article)
You should be aware that this is false. Modern "fairy" is derived from the word "fey" by the same suffix that gets us "wizardry" from "wizard". It referred to the realm where the fey lived, and in the modern day it has shifted in meaning to refer to the fey themselves.
The fair folk are so named in Celtic, using an adjective that means "attractive; pleasing to the eye". This was translated into English as "fair", a word that is etymologically unrelated to "fey". "Fey" is a loan from French; "fair" came from Old English (and proto-Germanic before that).
But it is true that there is a taboo (though that's a bit strong way to phrase it) about referring to them directly as "Fairies". Better to say "the Good People" or the like, in case they are listening, because they are very touchy and quick to take offence, and if they feel insulted, it will not go well for you.
The modern urban fantasy/romantasy novel thing about referring to the Fae always struck me as a little precious, though understandable; in a cultural context where "fairies" means Tinkerbell or the likes, it doesn't really get across the point you want to make, and Tolkien has so influenced "Elves" that nobody can copy him (except badly). A bit like turning "fairy" into "faery" so you can show how Our Elves Are Different; no, I'm not writing fairy stories, I am a Troo Pagan who venerates the faeries!
It's also very funny/somewhat alarming when you come out of a cultural context where "fairies" does *not* mean Tinkerbell or the likes to see the advertising of "Fairy Doors" so you want to invite in the fairies to your garden and home. Though even now that also is penetrating into the Irish market (alas? I'm not quite sure how to feel about yet one more tradition getting corrupted by the updated modern commercial Anglicised or at least Americanised version).
Brownies have always been welcome, haven't they?
Basically there is no longer a way to speak authentically about this people. No matter what you do, it will always come with heavy baggage, much like how there is no way for anyone at all to authentically hear the Beatles for the first time with no preconceived notions.
... Seems like a fitting situation if it happened on purpose.
> Basically there is no longer a way to speak authentically about this people. No matter what you do, it will always come with heavy baggage
I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. There is no way to speak authentically about the people because they don't exist. To speak authentically about them, you'd have to believe they were real.
I think his cartoon was much more successful than any of his food-related endeavors. And Herbert Hoover, rising all the way up to POTUS, was far more successful than the overwhelming majority of politicians. If the Bank of France hadn't triggered the Great Depression, who knows how his political career could have turned out.
Herbert Hoover was also one of the greatest humanitarians of all time, apart from being successful at business and becoming president. His ARA food aid during the Soviet famine saved about 4 million lives at a cost of $250 each.
https://substack.com/@ageofinfovores/note/c-197689936?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1lmgqf
I recall Scott's post got into that.
Ah I didn’t click through to the link. I honestly think he was a good enough humanitarian to include alongside or even in place of businessman in the main post, but either way I hope folks that see this comment will learn that hoover was an all time effective altruist. The paper that I link to is more recent than what Scott linked to.